London audiences at the Bolshoi’s “Swan Lake” will witness a departure from the company’s Soviet past in that “the swan actually dies. The balletomanes among you may snort indignantly that of course the swan dies, that Odette’s death is integral to the story and that it is, in essence, the pivotal point of the plot. But you are not reckoning with the thought police of the old Soviet Union, or the mind processes of its Ministry of Culture, and you clearly did not see the Bolshoi production designed by the famous Yuri Grigorovich in 1969 and performed by the company until the collapse of the old order.”