Big Cats and Diamonds Were Irina Bugrimova's Best Friends

Perhaps the story that Irina Bugrimova most liked to recount?and given her 46-plus years with the circus, all but the first 10 as a renowned lion tamer, she accumulated a reservoir of tales?concerned a 1950s incident that occurred outside the ring. Already top billed at home in the Soviet Union, where she became that nation's first woman to train big cats with the Moscow State Circus, Bugrimova had transferred her act to Circus Humberto in Czechoslovakia, joined by her second husband, Konstantin Parmakyan, a dressage rider. At various times her lions walked a taut two-cable tightrope tilted at an angle from the ground. Hurtled through hoops of fire. Gently plucked meaty morsels offered to them mouth-to-mouth by their mistress. Rode atop horses. Lay down side by side to create a carpet, upon which Bugrimova casually reclined. And, most spectacularly, soared with her on a trapeze platform high above the ring's animal cage, wrapped in her loving embrace.

Yet she most relished telling about the day that one of her charges, Demon, caused an unexpected stir. Intending to take a nap prior to her performance, Bugrimova, in her mid-40s at the time, first walked to a window to check on her lions, kept caged in a clearing outside. "Just then the trailer door flew open," a March issue of the British carnival and circus trade newspaper World's Fair quotes her as recalling. "I spun around in time to see a man nearly falling into the room. He was as pale as a ghost. I could see he was trying to say something. Finally, I made out the word lion.

"Suddenly we heard a woman's piercing scream. I shoved the man aside and threw open the door. There, on a little hillock about five yards away, a huge lion was outlined against the setting sun. A light breeze rippled his mane. He was so magnificent that for a moment I forgot the danger as I admired his beauty. My animals had never seemed so majestic and powerful in their cages or in the ring as he did now.

"He was leaping about playfully, retreating farther and farther away. I realized that he was enjoying his taste of freedom. Then I heard my husband's voice. He was running towards the lion. At the sound of our voices, Demon halted. He suddenly let out a roar in which I detected his dismay and, I thought, his plea for help.

"The cage in which my lions traveled was rolled into the clearing. I walked towards Demon, calling his name softly. When he was convinced that it was really I, he trotted over. I took him by the mane and patted him gently as I headed towards the cage. The mighty beast walked alongside, pressing against my leg, as if seeking protection. Yet a moment before he had caused so many people to panic as he roamed about. They had screamed in terror, though they were all in their trailers, and he could never have opened the doors himself.

"The door of his cage was raised, and Demon darted inside. It was only then that I realized the danger that had been averted. Demon might have easily bumped into someone; he might have killed in anger, too. The only 'weapon' I had was the cloth belt of my bathrobe. There in the cage was that beautiful beast, Demon. He was stretched out, and I could see that he was happy, because he was home at last."

Dressed in her hussar jacket, buckskin breeches and midcalf black boots?topped by her own mane of luxurious dark hair?Bugrimova struck a handsome figure in the ring, where she put as many as a dozen lions through their paces in an act that sometimes lasted more than 25 minutes. In addition to the above-mentioned leonine antics, she coaxed her troop into forming a pyramid, induced them to jump over obstacles and piloted a motorcycle atop a wall on the perimeter of the ring with a lion seated behind her. At one point her act even featured a liger, the progeny of a lion and tiger.

"She was a strong and energetic Russian woman, with a powerful mind?very creative," notes Alla Youdina, a former skater and trapeze artist in the Soviet circus, speaking over the phone from her home in Vermont. "And she had an opinion about everything. Everybody in Russia knew her. A huge attraction."

Dominique Jando, associate artistic director of the Big Apple Circus, concurs: "She was an extraordinary woman, kind of an adventurer, doing a lot of bizarre things. She was an enormous star in Russia."

Overseen by the ministry of culture in the bad old days of the evil empire, the Soviet circus was?and continues to be?held in the same artistic and esthetic esteem as the opera and ballet. Back then its biggest draws, such as Bugrimova, commanded salaries exceeded only by top scientists and politicians. Many performers came from circus families. Bugrimova did not.

Born on March 13, 1910, in Kharkov, Ukraine, the youngest of four daughters of a professor of veterinary medicine/practicing vet father and an aristocratic ballet-dancer mother, Irina Bugrimova excelled at athletics as a girl and teenager: volleyball, handball, discus, shot put, javelin, jumping, swimming, motorcycling, riding horses and, most notably, skating, winning the national speed-skating competition at age 17. No mere jock, she also studied ballet, and occasionally assisted her father in the operating room.

She gravitated to the circus in Kharkov, and at 19 developed a trapeze act there with Aleksandr Buslayev, who became her first husband. "I never liked that attraction," Bugrimova contended recently in the commemorative Russian-language magazine The World of the Circus, "because it was simply pure rote and senseless risk. My passion was for horses."

Together with Buslayev she joined the Moscow State Circus in 1930, and they set about creating a new act, "The Flying Sleigh," which debuted in 1937. In his 1958 memoir Jungle Acrobats of the Russian Circus, master animal trainer Boris Eder describes it this way: "They rocketed down a steep artificial mountain, which reached up to the circus roof, flew through a revolving hoop on the sleigh, and landed on a special shock absorber. This thrilling stunt prepared them for tackling lions." (Bugrimova also performed equestrian stunts while riding bareback.)

Bugrimova switched to lion-taming, she explained in The World of the Circus, when circus director A.M. Dankman "invited me to his office and said, 'I need a woman who can create the epitome of the image of a Russian animal trainer.' Of course I became inflamed with this idea. They brought me leopards, but I told Dankman, 'These aren't heroic animals?I can't present a heroic image. I prefer lions.' So they gave me young lions."

After studying with Eder and noted animal trainer Nikolaj Gladilshchikov, Bugrimova and Buslayev presented a new lion act, poetically entitled "The Circle of Daring," in 1940. Ultimately, though, the couple split: he carried on with a second wife; she went solo in 1946, brainstorming the various stunts that solidified her premier standing.

"A real trainer is one with the animals in the cage," she pointed out in The World of the Circus. "Every trainer has some method. You get new animals and you go a step further with them. You begin to think up something that's extraordinary, because, after all, one animal is not like another, and in time they take on different characteristics. For many years I invented a new trick for them." Altogether she worked with more than 70 different lions. "After a certain age there's a period when lions become extremely aggressive, and they're not trainable anymore. One has to give these animals to a zoo, and obtain younger animals for training."

One such aggressive cat, Nero, attacked her during her act in 1971, seriously mauling her leg, although Bugrimova, the consummate trouper, finished the performance. She finally retired in 1976, turning over her lions to a protege, then worked as an adviser to the circus, served on juries for international competitions and wrote two books. A favorite with the government as well as the public, Bugrimova was named a People's Artiste of the Soviet Union in 1969, living comfortably in Moscow, where she amassed a trove of czarist-era diamonds.

Quite out of the blue and through no fault of her own, Bugrimova served as the catalyst for a bizarre, convoluted and tragic series of events that shook the Soviet sanctum sanctorum in 1982?a power struggle of Tolstoyan proportions that saw Kremlinologists mopping their brows working overtime to read the murky tea leaves.

The story begins and ends with a funeral. On Dec. 27, 1981, Bugrimova attended the burial of her old colleague Nikolai Asanov, former director of the national circus. Upon returning to her home she discovered that she'd been burgled, her most valuable diamonds stolen. The KGB, which investigated such thefts, traced the gems to the apartment of the flamboyant Boris Buryatia, nicknamed Boris the Gypsy and Boris Diamonds, by profession a peripheral "singer" with the Bolshoi Theater, but best known as the very public consort of 52-year-old Galina Churbanova, party-girl daughter of then Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev. (Galina secured Boris' "job" with the Bolshoi.) A frequent and willful embarrassment to her father, wild-child Galina, wife of Deputy Minister of Interior Yuri Churbanova?her third husband?dearly loved three things: diamonds, the circus and younger men. The bisexual Boris shared these passions.

Summoned for questioning by the KGB in January 1982, Boris, accompanied by his lap dog, hopped into his Mercedes and drove to a Moscow prison dressed in a mink coat and mink boots. He denied stealing Bugrimova's diamonds, implicating instead Galina and her chum Anatoly Kolevatov, who succeeded Asanov as circus director. Rumors of the trio's alleged involvement in the heist quickly circulated, fanned by the KGB, headed at the time by a scheming Yuri Andropov, soon to be Brezhnev's successor.

When Gen. Semyon Tsvigun, the number-two man at the KGB?and Brezhnev's brother-in-law!?sought to arrest Boris, he was stymied by Brezhnev loyalist, Politburo bigwig and chief Communist Party ideologist Mikhail Suslov, who was intent on torpedoing Andropov's indirect attempts to tar the President. Suslov confronted Tsvigun, read him the riot act and advised him that he had only one option: suicide. The general complied, shooting himself on Jan. 19. When his obituary appeared in the party newspaper Pravda, it conspicuously lacked the signatures (a kind of endorsement) of Brezhnev and Suslov, but, in a complete break from convention, it bore the signatures of several KGB elite, who seldom, if ever, publicly surfaced.

Two days after Tsvigun put a bullet in his head, Suslov suffered a heart attack, dying on Jan. 25. One day later, during Suslov's solemn state funeral, attended by every high-ranking party official, including Brezhnev, the KGB arrested Boris.

Galina and Boris apparently ran a successful diamond smuggling operation, using circus contacts?she spent years with the circus after marrying and divorcing one of its star strongmen?to ferry the stones out of the USSR, where they were exchanged for cash. Also, Galina supposedly used her position as first daughter to exploit the diamond market through insider trading, Soviet style. Just before a price hike in precious gems occurred, jewelry stores would shut down for "inventory" purposes; when they reopened, prices had risen. With advance knowledge of when this process would take place, Galina bought up hundreds of thousands of rubles' worth of diamonds at the lower rate, then resold them at the higher one. She reportedly made several killings.

Bugrimova inadvertently was sucked into this swirling miasma of intrigue and corruption when she had the misfortune to show up at the same circus function as Galina wearing some of her most spectacular diamonds, easily outshining, so to speak, the President's daughter. Galina blew her stack, exacting revenge by cajoling Boris into lifting Bugrimova's gems while both women mourned at Asanov's graveside. But rumors persisted that Boris, in fact, had nothing to do with the theft; rather, sensing Brezhnev's waning powers, Galina's husband, a former KGB operative, had set up the Gypsy to inflict his own measure of vengeance for being cuckolded.

So the story goes. Whatever, by the end of 1982, Brezhnev was dead, Andropov ran the nation, Galina hunkered down waiting for the situation to cool off and Boris stewed in a Soviet big house, presumably minus his mink boots and lap dog. Accounts never mentioned whether Bugrimova retrieved her diamonds.

Even after the collapse of the USSR, Bugrimova remained a cherished icon. "Her life has become an example of courage, artistry, and industry for generations of circus performers," the news agency Tass trumpeted last year on the occasion of her 90th birthday. One month later the Russian culturati turned out en masse to fete her at Moscow's Central House of Art Workers. Very likely she wore diamonds.

That evening proved to be her swanky swan song: Bugrimova died, age 90, on Feb. 20 in Moscow. In his 1958 memoir, Boris Eder, more celebrated for his animal-training abilities than even Bugrimova, paid tribute to her at the apogee of her career. "Irina Bugrimova constantly rehearses new and more thrilling acts," he wrote. "She combines feminine grace with a man's strength and courage. Her lions, as she presents them, are really kings of beasts and dangerous animals, though she never accentuates the perils of her act. She is never satisfied."