ST. PETERSBURG, RUSSIA ? In February 1972, as the Washington Post’s Moscow correspondent, I visited the Vaganova Ballet Academy, principal training ground for the renowned Kirov/Maryinski Ballet, in its historic home in Leningrad – then the name of this exotic city on the Neva River. That visit provided something close to revelation.

The Vaganova Academy, where Vaslav Nijinsky, Anna Pavlova, Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov all learned to dance, first taught me how the Soviet Union accomplished its most important objectives. The secret was to limit the number of goals, and then to lavish resources on them. My visit to the Vaganova Academy was my first direct exposure to this method – which was the way the school produced world-class ballet dancers.

In June, I revisited the academy to see how the passage of 33 years and the collapse of the Soviet Union had changed this famous school.

The Soviet Union of 1972 was a poor country, but the Vaganova Academy had everything it needed. Each year the parents of 1,500 or more aspiring dancers from all over the U.S.S.R. applied for admission. Ninety 10-year-olds were accepted. Competition was rigorous. Beginning almost immediately, those who couldn’t cope were weeded out. Physical attributes were as important as dancing skills – only those who would be slim, attractive and the right height could stay. In 1972 the school’s eight classes had 460 students. One hundred ballet teachers instructed them. Dozens of other teachers provided the equivalent of a Soviet secondary education.

Anna Lavrinyenko is one of nine 2005 graduates of the Vaganova Ballet Academy chosen to join the Kirov/ Maryinski company.

Every year, half a dozen top graduates were taken into what was then called the Kirov Ballet company, a sort of living museum of classical Russian ballet, long regarded by critics as one of the most beautifully trained and elegant companies anywhere. The other graduates joined ballet companies across the U.S.S.R.

So how did the collapse of the Soviet system that supported this lavish arrangement change the Vaganova Academy? Amazingly little.

Of course some things are different. Finances, never an issue in the old days, are very difficult. But politics are relatively easy: There are no cultural commissars telling the academy what to do. Foreigners now study at Vaganova, partly as a way for the school to make some money, but also as a sign of the end of Russia’s isolation, a cardinal feature of the Soviet era. Vaganova graduates now join companies in Paris, London, Vienna and elsewhere, something their predecessors could do only if they defected to the West. Three of the Kirov’s biggest stars did just that: Rudolf Nureyev in 1961, Natalia Makarova in 1970 and Mikhail Baryshnikov in 1974. Their magnificent dancing taught Western ballet enthusiasts how good the Vaganova training was.

In the wings of the Maryinski Theater, students watch the Vaganova Ballet Academy graduation performance.

The academy’s management has changed, too. The bosses I met in 1972 were elderly and had the aura of Communist Party apparatchiks. Today’s director, Vera Dorofeyeva, is a lively and friendly woman, and the artistic director, responsible for the ballet training, is the stunningly beautiful former prima ballerina Altynai Asylmuratova. In the world of ballet she was known as “the divine” Asylmuratova, perhaps the greatest Russian ballerina of the late 20th century. She danced in the Kirov/Maryinski company for 22 years until 2000, when, at 39, she took her current job.

The students have changed, dramatically. This year’s graduates were 4 years old when the Soviet Union collapsed; they have no firsthand experience of the U.S.S.R. The applicants still come from all over the country, though the country is smaller now – Russia has about half the population of the U.S.S.R. The student body has shrunk from more than 450 to about 300, but the competition to get in is as fierce as ever. Today’s students work as hard as their predecessors: 10-12 hours a day, six days a week, from the age of 10 to 18, when they graduate – well, the fraction of the entering class that makes it all the way through.