Ballet was first introduced to Russia by Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich (1629-1676, reigned from 1645) the second Romanov ruler, at his wedding festivities.

Peter the Great (1672-1725) took a personal interest in the dancing at his court by bringing in Western dances and taking part in them himself. With the help of his prisoners, the Swedish officers, he taught his courtiers.

Charles-Louis Didelot (1767-1837) was the "father of the Russian ballet," invited to St Petersburg by Paul I.

Didelot said that "ballet is an action explained by a dance." From this premise he created a plasticity of movement that was free of the conventionalities of baroque ballet, using effective changes of scenery, and combining the dance of soloists and the corps de ballet which prompted the developments of ensemble dance in the Romantic period.

In 1828 Didelot created "The Prisoner of the Caucasus" from the Alexander Pushkin poem -- laying one of the first foundations of a distinctively "Russian" ballet; the choreographic illustration of national literature.

Yet throughout the 19th century, Russian posters advertising ballet performances still gave star billing to foreign dancers. And the music was also composed by foreigners.

Similarly, foreign precepts ruled in the classroom right up to the beginning of the 20th century, a monopoly only briefly interrupted when Ivan Valbergh (1766-1819) became the first native ballet master when appointed director of the Imperial School in 1794.

He composed ballets in the Sentimentalist style, dramatising the lives of humble people, praising virtue and condemning vice. In 1812 his "Love for the Fatherland" was said to have so inflamed its spectators that many went directly from the theatre to the recruiting offices to enlist against Napoleon.

The distinct style of a Kirov dancer can be traced back to the 1840s when three foreign dancers (Christian Johansson, Jules Perrot - the founder of Romantic ballet - and Marius Petipa) came to St Petersburg. Both as dancers and ballet masters, they each of them had their own style which would be absorbed into the Russian classical technique.

But by the late 19th century ballet in Russia was a stagnant form where the virtuoso demonstration of classical technique had become an end in itself while the narrative was enlivened only by character dances.

It was a Frenchman, Marius Petipa (1818-1910), who decisively refashioned this failing art form, structuring the haphazard tradition he had inherited, making a virtue of what would later be seen as its weakness - the deliberate lack of dramatic unity.

His most important and characteristic work produced a choreographic symphonism that can still be seen in "Raimonda" and "Sleeping Beauty," the peak of the Russian classical style.

As a choreographer Petipa gave much of his attention to the passages for soloists, tailoring each step to suit their capabilities and consciously shaping his steps along the structural forms of the music which he always chose with care, most successfully so with Tchaikovsky.

It had been the crucial lack of quality symphonic music that had hitherto prevented a complete unification with the increasing complexities of ballet movement.

Petipa introduced the strict proportions between mime and dance, and established the ensembles of the corps de ballet and the precise rules for the order of dancing in a pas de deux.

A performance of Russian ballet at the Mariinsky is the summation of these many and varied influences, but there is nevertheless something very "Russian" about it.