Few Westerners have ever heard of Perm. A former czarist administrative center, rustbelt Soviet city and gateway to the gulag, Perm was long off-limits to foreigners. In 1990, shortly after Mikhail Gorbachev opened the city, I became one of the first Westerners to visit. This spring I returned.

Perm has played a small but important role in the history of ballet. During World War II the Kirov (now Maryinsky) Ballet was evacuated there from besieged Leningrad. The city has an excellent ballet company and one of the best training academies in Russia. But its main claim to fame is that Serge Diaghilev, the founder of the celebrated Ballets Russes, grew up there. Between 1909 and 1929, the Ballets Russes brought ballet into the twentieth century and Russian ballet to the West. Diaghilev commissioned music from Stravinsky, Ravel, Debussy and Prokofiev; designs from Picasso, Matisse and Derain. His choreographers, who included Michel Fokine, Vaslav Nijinsky, Bronislava Nijinska and George Balanchine, dominated ballet until the 1970s.

The Ballets Russes never performed in Russia, and except for Firebird and Petrouchka, which entered the Soviet repertory just after the revolution (only to vanish by the 1930s), the modernist and neoclassical traditions associated with the company were anathema to cultural commissars. As for Diaghilev, who died in 1929, he became a Soviet nonperson. He was gay, a cosmopolitan, a champion of "formalism," with brothers who had fought for the Whites. Not until 1982 did a collection of writings by and about him appear in the Soviet Union. And only in 1987 would a conference about Diaghilev take place in Perm.

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