Mother Russia : Politics: Under <i> glasnost</i> , musicians, artists, writers and theater directors are traveling back to visit the audiences they never meant to leave behind.

She stands like a steel reed on the stage of the Bolshoi Conservatory, her tiny figure encased in gold lame, her mouth marked by a single streak of scarlet. Only her hands move, now flaying a violent chord, now lulling the violin almost to sleep. At intermission, the audience is ecstatic; fans rush the stage, shower her with flowers, even kneel at her feet and kiss her hand. At performance’s end, after three encores, she is flooded with roses, tulips and carnations--more than 50 bouquets in all.

“I have no words to describe my feelings,” Nina Beilina tells the packed audience filled with former students, youngsters, and middle-aged lovers of Beethoven and Mozart. Beilina means it. She isn’t a Moscow regular but an emigre who left 14 years ago, thinking it was for keeps. Now, she is back and performing for the first time on the very stage that was closed to her in the 1970s--after all, she was a woman, a Jew, an outcast.

Beilina, 50-ish and now a comfortable Manhattanite who teaches at the Mannes School of Music, is only one of dozens of exiled musicians, artists, writers and theater directors now traveling back to visit the audiences that they never meant to leave behind. Over the past two years, under Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost, Moscow has allowed and even encouraged such visits. “Before, they considered us traitors, but now we are considered victims of the regime,” said Beilina.

The list reads like a Who’s Who of Moscow: rebel writers Vladimir Voinovich and Vassily Aksyonov; outspoken theater director Yuri Lyubimov, who has not only visited but gotten back citizenship and his job as artistic director of the famous Taganka Theatre; dancers Rudolf Nureyev and Natalia Makarova; musicians Vladimir Ashkenazy, Mstislav Rostropovich and his wife, singer Galina Vishnevskaya, who recently toured Moscow and Leningrad with the National Symphony; sculptor Ernst Neizvestny, who once tangled with deposed leader Nikita Khrushchev over the meaning of art; and painter Mikhail Chemkyakin, whose works now fetch hundreds of thousands of dollars in New York and Paris.

The current visits are the outgrowth of a trend begun in 1986, when a select few Soviet cultural figures with travel privileges began spreading the word abroad that major changes back home were paving the way for the resurrection of the Soviet Union’s rich artistic heritage and the return of its living representatives. Those contacted early on included Rostropovich and Vishnevskaya, Lyubimov, Neizvestny and others. “They need people for agitational and propagandistic reasons,” scoffed Lyubimov at the time. But the director, who defected in 1983 to escape artistic suffocation and--like many other artists--was later stripped of citizenship, lived to eat his own words.

Little more than a year ago, Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze announced that the “stigma of class enemy” should be lifted from Soviet emigres and visas should be issued to permit free travel in a campaign to improve relations with expatriates. For many, the offer was irresistible.

After five years of difficult exile, during which Lyubimov divided his time between New York and Europe, he was invited back to Moscow in 1988 to direct productions of “Boris Godunov” and “Living,” the latter his long-banned play about a peasant who runs away from a collective farm. His citizenship was restored several months later, in May of 1989, and in December he had back his old job as leader of the Taganka. Now he has a Moscow apartment but maintains dual citizenship--Israeli and Soviet.

Vladimir Voinovich, now living in Washington, was forced out of the country in 1980 and stripped of his citizenship for the raucous and unorthodox lampooning of Soviet society in “The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin,” a banned novel that he sent to the West for publication. Now, the novel has been published in a Soviet journal with a circulation of 3.5 million readers. Unlike Lyubimov, Voinovich, Rostropovich and Vishnevskaya, he has not had his citizenship restored--and because he considers it revoked illegally he will never ask. But ask him where, or how, he would prefer to live, and his answer is clear.

“I would like to live both here and there,” he said. “My roots are there, my readers, my relatives, and my graves. It is my country and I never rejected my country.”

Sasha Sokolov, an acclaimed novelist best known for his “School for Fools,” returned to the Soviet Union seven months ago after a 15-year hiatus. For him, being immersed back in his native language has been a boon: “After a while, something just wasn’t right with my work. Gaps had developed.” Only after arriving did he realize that what he was missing was everyday Russian speech. Now, he revels in it, lapping up the latest jargon and slang “as if I had been waiting for these expressions all along.” An optimist who strongly endorses Gorbachev’s reforms, Sokolov said his homecoming has been “like a dream, and I am afraid to be awakened.”

The reader is very important to the Soviet writer, said Benedikt Sarnov, a Moscow literary critic who writes regularly for the liberal weekly Ogonyok. This, as well as the Soviet state’s heavy subsidization of culture, is reflected in the size of literary editions. While Western book runs are small--maybe 15,000 copies for an “exotic” Russian novel--Soviet editions come out in 50,000 or 200,000 at a time, said Sarnov. Unlike the West, where a writer must publish a book nearly every year to survive, in the Soviet Union the proceeds from a book can last a writer for two or three years.

But for those who have successfully adapted to the West, a permanent return is practically impossible. “Their lives are torn in half; one part is here and another is there,” said Sarnov.

In many instances, Soviet emigres have grown accustomed to different work standards, and also naturally want to maintain a higher, Western standard of living. The politics of culture remains tenuous. Battles rage between virulently right-wing writers and more democratically minded authors. Last month, a meeting at the Central Writer’s House in Moscow was broken up by a “mini-pogrom” led by members of the ultra-nationalistic, anti-Semitic organization called Pamyat.

The recent experience of writer Andrei Sinyavsky, who drew the West’s attention to the dissident movement in the mid-1960s with his imprisonment for publishing under a pseudonym in the West, shows that not everything has changed. Sinyavsky visited Moscow last January after an absence of 15 years. First, his visa was delayed until a day after the funeral of his friend and erstwhile co-author, Yuli Daniel, the reason for his visit. Throughout their stay, he and his wife were constantly followed and occasionally harassed. Then, on the way out, customs officials rifled through personal papers, address books, even his wife’s undergarments.

Voinovich, Beilina and the rest all worry about the wretched state of the Soviet economy and the indecisiveness of Communist Party leaders, about whether and how the precarious tightrope act to democracy can succeed.

“Maybe my country will rise up after all, will no longer be a beaten slave,” said violinist Beilina. She has traversed the darkness before, and, for the sake of the country she still considers her own, she is willing to risk it again. She is now talking with some Leningraders about teaching the violin there for part of the year. “If they make me an offer to come and do something--I’ll do it,” she said.

NEW WORLD FOR ARTISTS

Union leader is working to develop more opportunities for Soviet artists around the world. F6