Peter Pestov

Peter Antonovich Pestov (Russian: Пётр Антонович Пестов) is a Russian ballet teacher and choreographer.

Pestov was the first student of ballet dancer and teacher Alexander Pushkin and was an attendee of Agrippina Vaganova and Aleksei Pisarev's ballet classes. During World War II, Pestov was a senior at the Ekaterina Geidenreich's class at the Perm Ballet Academy. After the war, Pestov became a teacher to many orphans. During those times the government's ideology was to send the orphans to ballet school to learn discipline and culture. One day, he took them by force to a ballet performance. Following that, when he realized that their eyes got glued to the beauty of ballet, he decided to become a ballet teacher himself.

In 1958, after being a dancer for a while, Peter Pestov became a pedagogue in Moscow, Soviet Union. From 1963 until the mid-1990s, Pestov was a faculty director at the Moscow State Academy of Choreography. In 1975, he took the orphans to a music festival in Kiev, and performed Johann Sebastian Bach's Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor, BWV 582.

His pupils include: Vladimir Malakhov, Nikolai Tsiskaridze, Yuri Possokhov, Sascha Radetsky, Gennadi Saveliev, Yuri Burlaka, Alexei Ratmansky and Evan McKie.