Kirov at the crossroads.

The Maryinsky Ballet, still illogically called by its old Communist brand name, Kirov Ballet, recently returned to the Metropolitan Opera House for its first U.S. appearance since 1992. But it wasa whole political epoch ago--in 1989 when it was still justifiably designated the Kirov--that it made its first New York City appearance under its then comparatively new artistic director, Oleg Vinogradov. So in those six years, whither the Kirov? Whither the Maryinsky? Whither Vinogradov?

Unquestionably the Maryinsky is the cradle of modern classic dance. It is where the Franco-Russian choreographer Marius Petipa created his Russian ballet miracle during the second half of the nineteenth century, and from whence Michel Fokine and the impresario Serge Diaghilev internationalized Russian dance during the first quarter of the twentieth century. Many of the most illuminating dancers and choreographers of all time have been trained and nurtured by this company, seemingly Terpsichore's chosen.

So the Maryinsky Ballet was--and to some extent still is--a colossus in the world of dance. No company can match its history--it is nonpareil. And today? Ah, today ... Well, ever since the end of World War II the company has had to play second fiddle to the Bolshoi. It was Moscow's Bolshoi that first came to the West, to London in 1956--led by the Maryinsky's former chief choreographer, Leonid Lavrovsky, and the Maryinsky's legendary ballerina, Galina Ulanova, both of whom had long since been wooed away by Stalin to the capital city and its ballet company. But--as the West saw in 1961, when the Maryinsky, finally breaking free, appeared in quick succession in Paris, London, and New York all in one record-breaking tour--there was something special about classic dance's mother-of-us-all, some purity of style and grace of expression that no other troupe could quite match.

Of course, things change, even in a world so rooted in tradition as classical ballet. During the sixties and into the seventies the Maryinsky was led by Konstantin Sergeyev and his wife, Natalia Dudinskaya, but then after various artistic as well as political crises, Vinogradov took over in 1977, beginning what he himself has called "that discipline that is now known as my dictatorship." The fifty-eight-year-old Vinogradov, a haughty, aloof man, after graduating in Leningrad started with the Siberian company of Novosibirsk, where he began choreographing. I first encountered his versions of Romeo and Juliet and Cinderella with the Novosibirsk Ballet in 1967, the same year I saw in Moscow his first ballet, Asel, for the Bolshoi, a ponderous work full of socialist realism about a tractor driver and his girlfriend.

He is not a particularly talented choreographer--his original expressionist-styled ballet Battleship "Potemkin" might be recalled from earlier Kirov tours, as might his deadly full-evening Knight in the Tigerskin, while his reputation was scarcely enhanced by the brash yet uninteresting incompetence of both his additions to Swan Lake, first endured three years ago, or his latest version of Cinderella, just seen this summer at the Met. Moreover, Vinogradov himself has now become a controversial figure--not least for his founding in 1990, with money from the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's organization, the Universal--now Kirov--Ballet Academy in Washington, D.C. It seems that he also has interests in Tokyo, making further demands upon his time. As the Maryinsky company itself also tours widely, you get the strong impression that Vinogradov spends more time in the West than in Russia. Yet his imperious command of the company is never questioned, while his treatment of dancers still tends toward the Napoleonic.

Vinogradov is no fool--he has wriggled his way through the decline of Soviet bureaucracy to the shaky rise of Russian capitalism with considerable skill. And the company he heads--and has had to maintain through unprecedented financial difficulties, because from czar to commissar the Maryinsky never previously lacked for state money--seems in modestly good shape after eighteen years of his rule. Perhaps a dictator was needed. But today the dictator has acquired what--to follow a metaphor--might be called henchmen. Two principal dancers, thirty-two-year-old Farouk Ruzimatov and thirty-four-year-old Makharbek Vaziev, have been appointed deputy artistic director and company manager, respectively, both appointments appar-ently made against a background of feelings that not only was Vinogradov rather too much the absentee landlord, but also that the so-called Russian mafia was taking an all-too-positive interest in the company's activities and finances.

So it may be that the fortunes (if not the fortune) of the somewhat battered but still battling Vinogradov are on the wane--and that he will, sooner rather than later, go much the same way as the Bolshoi director, Yuri Grigorovich, went in Moscow. Things change. So perhaps it is time to assess what Vinogradov has achieved. Despite being a notably poor choreographer, no match for Grigorovich, that master of Bolshoi extravaganza, Vinogradov has done surprisingly well--perhaps better than his now-hallowed predecessor Sergeyev--as an artistic director.

He has opened the doorway to Western choreography--ballets by Balanchine, Petit, Robbins, Bejart, and Tudor are all now in the Maryinsky repertoire. He has preserved certain Soviet classics--Lavrovsky's original Romeo and Juliet and Rostislav Zakharov's The Fountain of Bakhchisaray--and, while his own meddling with the standard Petipa repertoire has been disastrous, he has, at least, restored some nineteenth-century classics, notably Le Corsaire and La Bayadere. He has also collaborated with former Bolshoi dancer Andris Liepa to restage a series of Fokine-Diaghilev classics never before produced in their native Russia, and a couple were seen at the Met. One of these, The Firebird, with decor and costumes closely based on the original Golovin designs, was a decorative gem, although the other, a smudgily inaccurate staging of Scheherazade, proved infintely less acceptable.

Vinogradov has also maintained (obviously helped by the mighty Vaganova Ballet Academy that is allied with the company) a steady supply of remarkable dancers. Yes, it can with justice be said that the company's standard of male dancing at the Met was, to put it mildly, substandard. Still, recent years have produced Igor Zelensky and Ruzimatov, and, earlier, Konstantin Zaklinsky and the erratic Alexander Lunyov; while distinguished ballerinas--from Altynai Asylmuratova through Zhanna Ayupova and Yulia Makhalina, to this season's Tatiana Amosova and, particularly, Anastasia Volochkova (the well-regarded Diana Vishniva was absent due to injury)--continue to emerge. Vinogradov must be doing something right