KEY POINTS:
Rudolf Nureyev specified that this be his final resting place.
The grave of the world's greatest male dancer is crowned by a glittering mosaic in gold, red and blue, their tiny squares forming the shape of an oriental rug to cover his coffin.
Nureyev's neighbours in the Russian Cemetery on the southern fringes of Paris are likewise members of the great, the good and the ennobled who fled their homes after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.
The graveyard's tree-lined avenues house row upon row of generals and admirals from the defeated White Army, of Tsarist princes and counts, of writers, composers and artists and their descendants. In all, more than 10,000 Russians have been buried here since the cemetery was opened in 1926.
Of the roughly 1.5 million Russians who emigrated, 400,000 of them came to France. Many settled in Paris, but they never forgot their roots. While the Soviet Union grew mighty and then crumbled, the emigres styled themselves keepers of the flame, nurturing the culture crushed by Reds.
"When you realise what these people went through living in exile, cut off from their culture, but not abandoning that culture or the commitment to its continuation, they did a tremendous service not only to those of us in the West who are reading it and were able to read it, but to Russians themselves," says Professor Stanley Rabinowitz of the Amherst Center for Russian Culture in Massachusetts.
Lenin, Stalin and their successors loathed the exiles, eyeing them as dangerous provocateurs. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the attitude shifted to indifference. Today, though, Moscow is singing a siren song.
President Vladimir Putin visited the Russian cemetery in 2000 and laid carnations on the grave of Nureyev as well as those of White Army officers in a sign of reconciliation.
"We should never forget that we are all children of the same mother, who is named Russia," Putin said.
Alexandre Jevakhoff, author of Les Russes Blancs, (The White Russians) a newly-published history of the 20th-century Russian diaspora, says Putin is thirsting for respectability, class and tradition to consolidate the legitimacy of the brash, acquisitive Russia.
"After the Soviet trauma and the disappearance of the USSR, Russia rediscovered the pre-1917 Russia and saw roots, history and certain values to which the Russian population was very attached, and certain names, well-known families provided an echo of this," says Jevakhoff.
"A second explanation is more political," he believes.
"The disappearance of the USSR set Moscow the challenge of gaining international prestige. By making an appeal to Russian emigres, the Russian Government obtained a kind of network of 'compatriots' which gave it more lustre, more influence. But Putin gains more benefit from it than the White Russians do."
Amongst the older generations, pedigree matters and squabbles over rank are notorious. There are also those who suspect that Moscow is plotting to grab churches and other assets owned by locally-run Orthodox churches.
Professor Rabinowitz fears the new generation of Russians may be overlooking the contribution of Paris' emigre community.
"If it wasn't for these people, not only the people who wrote, who created, or painted, but those who produced the environment which made it happen and those who preserved (Russian culture) and kept it and were loyal to it ... if it wasn't for them Russian culture would be very different."
