COLUMN ONE : Russia’s Blighted Ballet : The luster of the legendary Kirov and Bolshoi troupes has been tarnished by scandal, strikes and squabbles. Constant touring keeps them afloat--but at the expense of artistry.

When the curtain rose last week at the Kirov Ballet, the tawny glint of the stage lights on the gilded, ornate theater sent a shiver through an audience that had come hoping the legendary, 212-year-old company, now mired in scandal, could still dazzle.

But before the first act of “Don Quixote” was over, the thrill had faded into fidgets.

The first dancer onstage, lanky and athletic, flung her long limbs about; the lead danseur justified critics’ claims that the Kirov’s male contingent is uninspiring. And even the grace of veteran prima ballerina Tatyana Terekhova could not cover the disarray in the corps behind her.

During intermission, spectators sat under the chandeliers in the century-old theater wondering what had become of the strict discipline and transcendental artistry that produced such stars as Rudolf Nureyev, Natalia Makarova and Mikhail Baryshnikov.

“I felt it was still the Kirov, but . . ,” said Inna Hefler, a St. Petersburg balletomane who now lives in Germany, struggling to put words to her disappointment. “I’ve seen better.”

After long giving the West an inferiority complex, Russia’s majestic ballet companies have been hobbled by artistic, financial and spiritual crises. Scandals, strikes, galloping commercialization, vicious political squabbles, a brutal mugging, rumors of mafia infiltration and a business alliance between the Kirov and the Rev. Sun Myung Moon have robbed some of the glamour from the country’s most beloved troupes.

As the Russian government has slashed the generous Soviet-era budgets for ballet, the companies have been forced to spend more time on overseas tours to rake in enough hard currency to keep solvent. Many dancers live in pitiful poverty on salaries worth less than $100 a month when they perform at home. And critics say the endless touring, financial strain and political chaos in the companies are taking a toll on the dancers’ art.

Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater, after decades of stagnation, was paralyzed for 10 months recently by a savage feud between then-artistic director Yuri N. Grigorovich and then-general director Vladimir M. Kokonin. The internecine warfare polarized performers and triggered two unprecedented strikes.

In a dramatic conclusion this spring, after Grigorovich was forced out, the Bolshoi’s gold-embroidered curtain rose to reveal frowning dancers and stagehands milling about in blue jeans, causing the first cancellation of a scheduled ballet in its 219-year history.

The ruckus ended only when President Boris N. Yeltsin intervened and demoted the unpopular Kokonin, clearing the way for what ballet lovers hope will be an era of renewal at the Bolshoi under the revered new artistic director, Vladimir Vasiliev, himself once one of Russia’s greatest dancers.

Then, last week, stately St. Petersburg was reeling from the news that the general director and chief choreographer of the Kirov, which was founded under Catherine the Great, had been detained for alleged corruption.

Anatoly Malkov was nabbed in his office while accepting $10,000 in marked bills from a Canadian impresario who was cooperating with St. Petersburg police.

Police said they seized $150,000 in cash from Malkov’s office and more than $100,000 when they arrested controversial choreographer Oleg Vinogradov, the Kirov’s chief artistic administrator.

But Vinogradov told the St. Petersburg newspaper Nevskoye Vremya that the only money that police found in his apartment was $3,002, which he had brought into the country legally and declared to Russian customs. Malkov told journalists that a videotape of stacks of money found in his office was a fake. He said he had accepted the $10,000 from Canadian John Cripton but that the money was a bonus for good work, not a bribe.

Cripton, who reintroduced the Kirov to Western audiences in 1986 with a tour that began in Vancouver, Canada, said he recently became aware that Kirov management was skimming part of the money paid--often in cash--to the company for overseas tours.

In a telephone interview from Ontario, Canada, on Monday, he said he alerted police two months ago, learned that a corruption investigation already was under way and agreed to help authorities by offering Malkov a bribe in exchange for Malkov’s signing a contract for a new overseas tour.

Cripton said he was prompted to contact the police by disgust and the realization that a company he loved was being starved. Indeed, government subsidies that once covered 85% of the Kirov’s operating expenses now finance just 15%. He said the ballet’s remaining earnings were being used to subsidize the costly Kirov Opera.

“The company’s day-to-day activity was being affected,” he said. “They did not have money for new productions, for expansion. . . . I put 10 years of my life into the Kirov because I believe in them. I think they are quite wonderful. To see them treading water at this point, I could not accept [this].”

An Old, Open Secret

Ballet cognoscenti here were not surprised. They said corruption is an old, open secret. “It happens often, and it happened under the Communists,” said Anatoly Agamirov, Moscow’s best-known ballet critic and a commentator for the Ekho Moskvy radio station. “Everyone knew it perfectly well. . . . It was a system of extortion that was worked out in the Soviet Union like fine clockwork.”

Western critics say the scandal could further tarnish the Kirov’s reputation. The company limped home early from an American tour this summer after critics panned its New York performance, and the second half of its itinerary, including a planned trip to Orange County, was abruptly canceled.

Critics suspected slumping ticket sales. Cripton said the Kirov packed the house in New York; the problem was an interview given by Vinogradov in America saying he had been brutally mugged back home by would-be blackmailers. The interview left the impression that the Kirov was under siege by the Russian mafia.

“The word here was [Vinogradov] was trying not to have to go back [to Russia] because he was afraid for his life,” said Robert Greskovic, a critic and dance historian for Dance Magazine, among other publications.

Cripton said the Kirov tour collapsed after two spooked American impresarios decided they did not want to risk trouble with the Russian mob and backed out.

It was not the first bout of self-inflicted bad press for the Kirov, which has reclaimed its pre-revolutionary name, the Maryinsky Theater, for use in Russia but continues to tour abroad under its better-known Soviet-era brand name, the Kirov Ballet.

There was the earlier news that Vinogradov had founded a Washington dance school financed by Moon’s Unification Church and run by Vinogradov’s wife. “It’s probably part of Moon’s attempt to clean up his image in the U.S.” following the South Korean religious leader’s prison stint for tax evasion in America, said Robert Johnson, a New York dance critic and editor of an Internet entertainment guide called Metrobeat.

Moon’s daughter-in-law, ballet dancer Julia Moon, was sent to Russia for coaching from the Kirov pros and performed at the historic theater, Johnson said.

There were also reports that Vinogradov was spending more time doing business abroad than nurturing his troupe in St. Petersburg, and there was the steady talent hemorrhage--at least six top Kirov dancers and coaches left for better-paying jobs in the West.

Moreover, the Kirov has suffered from overexposure. In the glasnost love feast of 1989, for example, scalpers charged $200 for a ticket to the Kirov’s New York performance of “Giselle,” and Newsweek dubbed the company a “Leningrad Miracle.” By 1992, during the Kirov’s third U.S. tour in six years, Newsweek declared that the novelty was wearing off and reported that the opening-night performance of “Romeo and Juliet” had left the audience cold.

When the Kirov opened in New York in June, “things looked a little sloppy,” said critic Greskovic. Although the company put on four young and “amazingly talented” ballerinas, Greskovic found the male dancers wanting.

Backlash in America

The bungled tour fed a growing feeling that “American ballet art has taken a back seat too long to the great Russian companies,” Greskovic said. “And now that they’re a little bit down--some would say a lot down--people have started to say, ‘What’s so great about them?’ ”

Vinogradov has made disastrous changes in the Kirov repertoire and has promoted a new breed of ballerinas who tend to be young, tall, long-limbed, athletic--and dull, said Clement Crisp, ballet critic for the Financial Times in London. He noted, though, that the troupe’s ticket sales were brisk when it was last in Britain.

But other critics note that the bribery scandal could make Western impresarios leery of booking the Kirov if the company is no longer a sure-fire moneymaker. They added, however, that such ethical concerns will stay offstage if Kirov ticket sales remain strong.

Russian balletomanes say corruption has flourished in one form or another ever since the Soviet Union first began sending its artists on overseas tours in the 1950s. Agamirov said dancers, musicians and other performers selected for foreign travel were expected to demonstrate their gratitude to the powerbrokers who sent them; in Soviet times, that meant returning with expensive gifts. A crate of fine crystal from Czechoslovakia, for example, might have earned a talented young pianist a chance to perform in Paris.

Those who failed to show their appreciation stayed home.

And while cash bribes were considered far too dangerous in the Soviet era, Agamirov said, many performers now are expected to hand over a share of their hard-currency earnings--in cold cash--for the privilege of performing abroad.

“For a citizen of the former Soviet Union, hard currency is an economic stimulus of a power never envisioned by Marx,” he said. “What surprises me is that the system continues today.”

In Soviet times, the Bolshoi and Kirov were considered national treasures; they grew into vast institutions that housed ballet and opera companies in precious landmark theaters. Even after wrenching budget cuts, the Bolshoi, for example, still employs 6,000 people.

And now that Russian impresarios can cut their own deals without sharing proceeds with the notoriously corrupt Soviet Ministry of Culture, opportunities for payola have multiplied. According to Russian media reports, some impresarios grossly undercharge for performers’ services--in exchange for under-the-table payoffs from the Westerners arranging a foreign tour--while others have allegedly threatened to cut short successful tours unless they are paid off.

Meanwhile, a Soviet-flavored climate of fear and intimidation still prevails at the Maryinsky.

“Everybody is afraid,” one ballerina whispered before dashing from the theater, saying she could get into trouble if she was even seen speaking to a journalist.

A bolder pianist said she hopes the scandal will force the government to clean house at the Kirov but fears that wrongdoers are well-connected enough to keep their jobs. “They took bribes from the artists,” she said. “If you want to sing [at the Kirov Opera], you have to pay. If you want to go overseas on tour, you have to pay. If you don’t, you get small parts or you stay home. Even if [legendary diva] Maria Callas worked here, she would still have to pay to be a soloist.”

But this pianist and other musicians were quick to add that Valery Gergiev, the revered Kirov Orchestra and Opera director, never stooped to such tactics.

A member of the opera chorus said he earns $40 a day on overseas tours but only $90 a month in St. Petersburg. That is a tragicomic sum in a city where some prices are now steeper than those in West European capitals. But he has toured five cities in the past six months and considers himself extremely lucky.

“A $400 stereo system is a huge luxury for most people here, and I have one,” the 24-year-old said. “So what we are paid is really good by most standards.”

He said he and his colleagues long suspected that management was skimming from their overseas earnings and had their suspicions confirmed when they read in the Russian press that police had accused Malkov and Vinogradov of stashing up to $3 million in foreign bank accounts.

Yevgeny Ivanchenko, 20, who emerged drenched with sweat from a practice room where he was preparing to perform the leading role in “Swan Lake,” knows Vinogradov and said he “cannot believe he would take a bribe.”

But Ivanchenko’s appeared to be the minority opinion. Rumors that gangsters are getting a cut of the Kirov’s proceeds are rife. Some Kirov employees speculated that Malkov and Vinogradov were set up for a police sting because they had not paid the mafia enough.

Others saw the investigators’ decision not to arrest the two men immediately, citing lack of evidence, as proof that the authorities were paid to drop the matter.

The Moscow Times newspaper denounced the authorities’ decision to allow the men to go from jail back to their jobs as “scandalous.” Cripton agreed, saying he believes he has handed authorities a convincing case against the Kirov bosses. “If they haven’t been charged, there is something wrong with their system,” he said.

Prosecutors say the investigation continues.

St. Petersburg’s Shame

“The scandal in the Kirov is the shame of St. Petersburg,” said ballet master Nikita A. Dolgushin, a former Kirov dancer who teaches at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, across the street from the Kirov’s domes.

To Dolgushin, the most serious problem facing Russian ballet is not penury or corruption but the erosion of the spirituality that has always distinguished the dance greats here. “The creative process has been replaced by a process of commercialization,” he said. “Artists have stopped thinking about what kind of performance they are giving and instead think of how much it’s worth.”

Ballet stars who spend up to six months of the year on the road earning dollars lack the time and concentration to improve their art, he said, and “the stars who do come back dance badly because here they are dancing for rubles.”

Despite all the problems, Dolgushin insisted that Russia’s vaunted ballet school system could still produce a dancer of Baryshnikov’s caliber--provided the young artist had the spiritual strength to survive today’s mercenary ballet world.

“Baryshnikov appeared during a period of the most dreadful stagnation,” he recalled. “He left because he was afraid he would have no freedom. Now, we have freedom, but no Baryshnikovs.”