In her fine new biography of Rudolf Nureyev, Julie Kavanagh recounts the strained scene at Le Bourget airport in Paris in 1962 when the young glamorous dancer finally decided he wanted to stay in the West rather than return to Russia.

It is the stuff of a John Le Carre spy novel and reads oddly now, since the collapse of the Soviet Union has, in Russia at least, made such moments of individual courage less common.

After a triumphant run with the Kirov in Paris, Nureyev, the brightest young dancer in the troupe, was suddenly informed at the airport by his company minders, without explanation, that he would not be going on to perform in London. Nureyev smelled a rat.

Always a spirited soul, he was aware that his communist overlords thought his often outlandish behavior not just inappropriate but decadent, too. He threatened communism’s need for order and preference for compliant mediocrity. Nureyev faced a forced return to Moscow and a lifetime of misery and regrets.

Sitting forlornly at a table in the airport bar as his fellow hoofers headed for the gate, Nureyev, surrounded by burly KGB heavies, whispered to a French friend that he was profoundly unhappy, feared for his life, and wanted to defect. She, in turn, told the airport police that Nureyev was being held against his will and wished to remain in the West. But, they replied, they had no jurisdiction to intervene; Nureyev had to demand asylum himself. Which is just what the dancer did.

As Nureyev remembered, “I decide right there and then that I’m not going back. This was goodbye time.” He walked six paces over to two French policemen, standing at the bar. “No jumping, no running, no screaming, no hysteria. Quietly I say: ‘I would like to stay in your country.'” The KGB thugs tried to grab him, but one of the flics intervened. “Ah non!” he said. “Ne le touchez pas. Nous sommes en France.” And, literally with one bound, Nureyev was free.

For anyone over 40, such dramatic incidents, though comparatively rare, made up a great deal of our everyday understanding of the perniciousness of the Soviet system. It was not just the odd Russian athlete or artist who defected in spectacular style.

Hundreds more humble workers tunneled under, clambered over, and drove around the Berlin Wall, the “security fence” built to detain economic migrants in a country which had long offered its countrymen little in the way of hope. Many refugees died in their effort to escape, branded economic criminals in their own country, heroic defectors in the West.

But if the bad old days of the Iron Curtain are long gone, Soviet thinking about the freedom of movement of labor and the need to restrict trade to maintain domestic jobs seems to be creeping back into favor here. The clamor for closed markets and tighter immigration can be heard from all sides in the presidential candidates’ debates.

The fear of what continuing large scale economic immigration, overwhelmingly by Mexicans, will do to American jobs and American society underlies the arguments, mainly heard from Republicans, to seal off the border and build up the fence.

On both sides, the issue of health and safety is cited as a sly means to cut off China’s trade in toys, toothpaste, and much else. Among Democrats, even Hillary Clinton, whose husband resisted the siren voices of those advocating import duties and protected markets, is edging towards protectionism.

A couple of weeks ago, when General Motors was suffering a strike, the union demanded that the company guarantee American jobs by agreeing not to outsource work to cheaper workers abroad. But restriction begets restriction. When one country imposes limits on trade, others quickly follow.

What the expensive American car workers failed to take into account was that if there is ever to be salvation for the America motor industry, it will be through exporting more American cars. Immigration is an altogether more confused issue, but the same principle applies. The influx of inexpensive foreign labor is an essential ingredient for the continued growth of the American economy.

Immigrants fill jobs which Americans do not do and free up Americans to work in more profitable fields. No one has fixed the system because it works, at least economically.

Yet there is a lingering question about immigration which is uncomfortable to try to answer. As a nation built by immigrants, each American family has in its past a bold founding generation who made a similar daring decision to walk the six small steps that Nureyev took to exercise his right to free labor and free speech.

So why, when we read of Nureyev’s daring escape from the horrors and deprivations of communism, do we cheer, but when we see night vision pictures of illegal immigrants shuffling across the Mexican border to escape poverty do so many of us scream?

nwapshott@nysun.com