The Bolshoi's Spinning Dance of Power Moscow's renowned Bolshoi Theater is in crisis. Last January, Sergei Filin, the artistic director of the Bolshoi, was almost blinded when distilled car battery acid was thrown in his face outside of his apartment. Pavel Dmitrichenko, a mercurial soloist who harbored a grudge against Filin for failing to cast his ballerina girlfriend in choice roles, confessed to organizing the assault - then recanted. His trial is now underway, but it seems a foregone conclusion that he will be convicted and sentenced to a dozen or more years in the penal colonies. The barbaric crime has not silenced Mr. Filin's critics, chief among them Nikolai Tsiskaridze, another former soloist. He has acted the part of a Dostoyevskian subversive, spinning tales of criminal conspiracies, financial schemes and personal rivalries at the Bolshoi. After being implicated in the attack last winter, he mounted a wild-eyed public relations campaign in his defense, pressing his case against the then-general director, Anatoly Iksanov. Both Mr. Tsiskaridze and Mr. Iksanov have since been dismissed from the Bolshoi. Over a week ago, Mr. Filin flew to Germany for the latest operation to save his right eye, but the procedure had to be postponed. He returned to Moscow to confront a financial extortion allegation from a 19-year-old ballerina, Joy Womack, a native of Texas and member (until a few weeks ago) of the Bolshoi corps de ballet. An expurgated interview with Ms. Womack appeared in the newspaper Izvestia, which, for reactionary political reasons, has taken Mr. Tsiskaridze's side in his campaign against Mr. Filin and the Bolshoi Theater administration. Senior dancers and teachers dispute her claims, and Mr. Filin just wants to get back to work; he's hoping to realize his dream of a series of ballets to plays by Shakespeare, including "Hamlet" and "The Taming of the Shrew." Ballet is a self-destructive art, privileging the will over the body. Great dancers retire in physical ruin; the next generation assumes their roles. That same impulse has been observed politically over the course of Russia's history. The nation has repeatedly dismantled itself in the service of renewal. Institutions are collapsed, or allowed to collapse, to facilitate their transformation by the ruling powers. The Bolshoi will emerge from this time of troubles to better reflect the nostalgic imperialism of Vladimir Putin's Russia. There is truth to the adage that ballet is the most Russian of the arts and the Bolshoi the most Russian of its theaters. Since its founding in 1776, the government has regarded it as an emblem of power, whether ideological or commercial or both. There has been as much politics on its stage as art. Stalin delivered speeches at the Bolshoi before cowed Communist Party officials who dreaded being the first to stop applauding. Competing bureaucracies supervised the repertoire, censoring scenarios and sponsoring the invention of a genre of dance (known as dramballet) to convey Marxist-Leninist content. In true Socialist-Realist spirit, bulldozers lumbered from the wings before audiences of peasants and workers. At the same time, the Bolshoi was called upon to preserve the Russian tradition, to hold up the beautiful past as testament to the glorious Soviet future. When that future unraveled in 1991, during a failed coup to unseat Mikhail Gorbachev, Soviet television showed not the scene on the streets but a performance of "Swan Lake" at the Bolshoi. Those days only seem to be long gone. History is circular in the Russian imagination; the present loops back to repeat the past. The eerie interregnums when the present has already been discredited, but before a familiar pattern kicks in, are often nervously referred to as bezvremen'ye, a time without time. The Kremlin took notice of the discord at the Bolshoi last summer by appointing a new general director, Vladimir Urin. He has little patience for intrigue and even less for Mr. Tsiskaridze. According to a widely disseminated report by Kseniya Sobchak, Mr. Urin responded to the minister of culture's suggestion that Mr. Tsiskaridze might return to the Bolshoi with the Russian equivalent of "over my dead body." Mr. Tsiskaridze might have followed the onetime Bolshoi star Nina Ananiashvili back to his native Georgia. But something unexpected happened. On Oct. 28, he was named acting rector of the eminent Vaganova Ballet Academy in St. Petersburg, one of the world's most prestigious schools for dance.