Bolshoi Ballet of censorship. It was the first time a show has been pulled in such a way since the collapse of the Soviet Union, sparking rumours about the motivation behind it. Today the Bolshoi Ballet remains one of the world's foremost ballet companies, in addition to being one of the largest, with approximately 220 dancers. The word "bolshoi" means "big" or "grand" in Russian. The company operates on a hierarchical system, similar to those used by other leading European ballet companies, with senior dancers ranked as principals, and descending in order of importance through lead soloist, first soloist, soloist and finally,
Russian phonology such as . Russian features general regressive assimilation of voicing and palatalization. In longer clusters, this means that multiple consonants may be soft despite their underlyingly (and orthographically) being hard. The process of voicing assimilation applies across word-boundaries when there is no pause between words. Within a morpheme, voicing is not distinctive before obstruents (except for , and when followed by a vowel or sonorant). The voicing or devoicing is determined by that of the final obstruent in the sequence: ('request'), ('vodka'). In foreign borrowings, this isn't always the case for , as in ('Adolf Hitler') and ('the count is