The article examines the ballet “The Red Poppy” by Reinhold Glière and Mikhail Kurilko in the context of the title “the first Soviet ballet” that has been assigned to it and stuck. Its composition history is analyzed as a myth of the miraculous attainment of an “authentic-Soviet ballet.” Staged in the year of the decade of the October Revolution, it completed the choreographers’ attempts to find a model of a “truly Soviet ballet,” that is to adapt the “monarchist art of classical dance” to the new socio-political system. The authors of “The Red Poppy” chose a radically conservative method. The anti-colonial plot about the class struggle in China and the Soviet people was developed in the patterns of the ballet theater of the
late 19th century, which defined the script, the dance and the music. This gave an unexpected result of contemporary Russia appearing on the stage as a colony of the Soviet Union. For the first time the “Red Poppy” poetic is considered together with the diplomatic maneuvers of the Soviet government and the cultural events preceding the premiere. The work of Edward Thayerman, a major scholar of Soviet-Chinese cultural communication in the 1920s, is introduced into the Russian discourse.