DANCE WORLD PUZZLED BY SOVIET INVITATIONS

The news this week that the Soviet Union has invited defector Mikhail Baryshnikov to come home to dance stunned dancers as well as diplomats. While Baryshnikov himself is deciding what to do about the invitation, others in the worlds of culture and international politics are puzzling over its wider implications.

And on Thursday, Natalia Makarova announced in New York that she too has been “invited as a guest artist in February, 1987.”

A statement issued by her New York agent, Robert Lantz, said that the former Kirov star, who defected in 1970 and is now in the autumn of her dancing career, received a phone call last week from Yuri Grigorovich, the artistic director and chief choreographer of the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow, “making Makarova the first invitee, not Baryshnikov.”

“She will decide early next week” whether to accept the invitation, Lantz said.

Discussing the apparent changes in Soviet arts policies, guest journalist Dusko Doder, who has just completed a tour as Moscow bureau chief for the Washington Post, said on the “MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour” this week:

“Look how many people have fled the Soviet Union since the end of World War II. A number of them. And the Soviet practice has been that they are non-persons, they are denounced as traitors, they don’t exist, their names are wiped out, and all of a sudden a leader comes and says, ‘Come on over and dance, and then go back.’ ”

Although the invitation to Baryshnikov, artistic director of the American Ballet Theatre, was delivered Sunday by Grigorovich, who was in New York to announce the coming schedule of the Bolshoi, it appeared to come from Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev himself. “I have the official sanction of the government to invite you to dance at the Bolshoi Theater,” Grigorovich said.

The Bolshoi hasn’t performed in the United States since 1979, while Baryshnikov, who used to dance for the Kirov Ballet in Leningrad, hasn’t been back to the Soviet Union since he defected during a tour in Toronto in 1974.

Yesterday, the expatriates’ names were nowhere to be found in Soviet dance books. The lot of them--Rudolf Nureyev, Makarova, Alexander Godunov and Baryshnikov--became non-persons overnight. The glory that was Russian ballet suddenly vanished--in image, in history.

Today, these and other celebrity defectors, who hit the Western bricks running, face an unprecedented prospect of returning to their homeland as guest artists.

The invitation to Baryshnikov, regarded as the most stellar among defectors, to dance on the mighty Bolshoi stage, followed on the heels of the release of dissident physicist Andrei Sakharov from his exile in Gorky, and an offer to Yuri Lyubimov, an avant-garde theater director, to return from Washington where he recently staged a version of “Crime and Punishment.”

But while Baryshnikov is still “thinking over” last Sunday’s invitation, according to his manager, Edgar Vincent, a number of other Soviet emigres are figuring what the sudden Politburo thaw could mean--to them personally and to the entire climate of cultural relations.

Valery Panov, the former Kirov Ballet caractere dancer and Jewish refusenik who now lives in Jerusalem, says he heard from his agent in London, S. A. Gorlinsky, that he’s been invited too.

Panov, who became an international cause celebre and finally was allowed to leave--after being barred from dancing as well as being branded a hooligan and imprisoned--spoke with unabashed enthusiasm about the possibility of an open-door policy in Soviet arts affairs.

“Going back would mean so much to me, to everyone,” Panov said on long-distance telephone. “I could show how important it is to be free and to grow. I was only dancer before. Now, I have my choreography to show. They’re dreaming of seeing me there.

“What I hear now is sensational,” he added. “It’s a welcome home. I want to say ‘Thank you, Mr. Gorbachev for the invitation.’ ”

But Panov--who, with his ballerina wife, Galina, has been a guest dancer with many companies, has made dances for the Berlin Ballet, and who until recently was a director with the Royal Ballet of Flanders--said he’s “a little afraid about an explosion inside Soviet Union. He (Gorbachev) is a new man, it’s a new generation. I’m not afraid to go, but maybe it’s better to wait and see what happens.”

Panov said he is a good friend of Lyubimov and thinks the director should return “because Yuri belongs to the Russian language and his theater is there.”

However, he said pointedly: “Nureyev is upset, Gorlinsky told me, because he was not invited.”

The two former Kirov stars collaborated in 1980 when Panov choreographed a work based on Dostoyevsky’s “The Idiot” for Nureyev. Gorlinsky, the impresario who also represents Nureyev and Makarova, would not confirm the remark.

Reached in London, Gorlinsky said that besides Baryshnikov and Makarova, only Panov and Mstislav Rostropovich, the cellist-conductor, were asked by the Soviets to appear as guest artists. “But I have no document,” he said. “This is all from articles in the London Times and the Telegraph.”

The agent said Nureyev would not speak on the subject of amnesty to defectors, “because he has never made any political comments since he arrived in the West (26 years ago) and he won’t now.

“But Nureyev invented defection. He’s the original. His poor mother sits in the Soviet Union and Pravda announces that he’s free to visit her. Who could know if he’d get out again? Too risky.”

Godunov, who joined American Ballet Theatre after defecting in 1979, has not been seen much on the dance stage since Baryshnikov--his boyhood classmate from Riga--offered no contract renewal. According to an agent who handles his film career, the former partner of Maya Plisetskaya “worries about retribution against his family in Moscow, and so does not want to comment on the big news.”

Leonid and Valentina Kozlov, now principals with the New York City Ballet after defecting in 1979, take a more jaded view of the new Soviet friendliness. Since only they, and Godunov, who just became a naturalized citizen, are Bolshoi alumnae, they question the guest list.

“All sounds to me very strange,” said Leonid from his New Jersey apartment. “If it will be real, why did Grigorovich invite only one? So I think it’s just the publicity motive. They worry about other defections from the Bolshoi tour in June. This is maybe protection.”

Would he consider an offer if it were made?

“First, I would need a couple of hostages from the Soviet embassy,” Kozlov said.

But his ex-wife Valentina admitted that she finds the prospect of free travel in and out of the Soviet Union tempting.

“Things are changing there,” she said. “They are looser now. The authorities are letting relatives of emigres come for a visit. I think I’ll have to wait and see.”

“I would love to dance on the Bolshoi stage again,” she said, just prior to a gala performance Wednesday night at the State Theater. “And I’m very happy at the thought of what’s happening. Freedom is the reason we defected. But I don’t really know if this is serious or just a campaign. I would first want a promise of exit.”

“You know I have been an expert in the Soviet Union,” said Doder on public television. The foreign correspondent, who has also just completed a book, “Shadows and Whispers” tracing the power politics within the Kremlin from (Leonid) Brezhnev to Gorbachev, added: “But if you had asked me just six months ago whether this was possible, I would say, no.

“We had Sakharov first, Mr. Gorbachev phoned him; I mean it’s an act of contrition where he apologizes, in effect, brings him back to Moscow. You have Baryshnikov officially invited back by Yuri Grigorovich . . . you have a whole series of things. . . . Of course, it’s sincere. You know Bolshoi is the jewel in the Soviet cultural crown, and Grigorovich is a person of great standing in Moscow.”

Doder believes Gorbachev is acting primarily for domestic reasons. As he said in a telephone interview “the ballet holds a very special place in Russian culture,” and as he said on PBS, “Gorbachev needs the intellectuals in order to carry on his program of reconstruction. He’s faced with a Soviet bureaucracy which is opposed to changes, and in order to do something he has to bring along the intellectuals who have to provide the stimulus, the excitement . . . and the new movies, new theaters. It seems to be partly tactical, you bring people along and so forth, but partly it’s substantive.”

Doder cautioned that this policy of loosening the reins does not mean a change in the political structure or authoritarian nature of the Soviet system, and it is after all easier to deal with cultural policies than with the economy. “What you have is . . . a wise and benevolent czar who is treating people nicely.”

The irony to some, including Doder, is that a little more than a year ago Baryshnikov starred in “White Nights,” a rather chilly movie in Cold War terms, in which Baryshnikov’s character, a ballet star and defector, is in a plane over Siberia, and the plane crashes. The star is thus forced to return.

In Hollywood, Taylor Hackford, who directed “White Nights” issued a statement saying the invitation to Baryshnikov is “great. Gorbachev is a very smart politician, and I champion what he’s doing. ‘White Nights’ related to previous Soviet regimes and I wouldn’t be surprised if Gorbachev is reacting to the very valid criticism voiced in ‘White Nights’ and is trying to show that it’s a new era.”

When PBS’ Judy Woodruff, noting that in the movie the star is captured and told he cannot go back to America, asked whether there is any chance the Soviets might keep Baryshnikov, Doder dismissed it. No chance at all? Woodruff asked.

“Why?” asked Doder. “I mean it seems to me the fact that they have done it at a press conference . . . it’s also an act of apology.”

Baryshnikov will probably dance at the Palace of Congresses, where Vladimir Horowitz played, Doder said. It is a 5,000-seat auditorium, “I don’t think you’ll be able to get a ticket.”