Yury Grigorovich's Spartacus, produced in 1968, was the third attempt at staging the piece, and the first to be successful. So successful, indeed, that it became an icon of Soviet art, an all-conquering example of ballet as portrait of a state's ideals, done with compelling boldness. It also hinted (without irony) at facets of cold war ideology: hordes of male dancers mirroring the fact of Russian troops in eastern Europe; the socialist realism of a group indomitable in the face of oppression; Roman debauchery contrasted with the innocence of slaves and the goose-stepping legionaries as reminder of German militarism.

All this, of course, was par for the confrontational politics of the time. Its appeal was in the commitment of its cast, the surging populism of Khachaturian's score, the massive scale of Grigorovich's choreography and in the performances of male principals who incarnated Spartacus with heroic bravura. From Vasiliev and Lavrovsky in the 1970s until Mukhamedov in the 1980s, the ballet was a hymn to the strength of the Bolshoi's men.

The survival of Spartacusin the post-glasnost era might have seemed less likely, but audiences responded, and still respond to Grigorovich's driving ensembles, to the uncomplicated psyches of the principals, to a sense of mounting tragedy culminating in the final pieta`. Spartacus impels its performers, drags its public forward, with undeniable power.

Thursday's cast was led by Dmitri Belogolovtsev, a soaring slave-leader but lacking, for me, something of the emotional glamour that such a leader should have, with Anna Antonicheva as the beloved Phrygia, a touching performance reminiscent of Bessmertnova's linear poetry. The Crassus was Vladimir Neporozhny, elegant in manner but missing the role's arrogance, with Galina Stepanenko as Aegina, mistress of those games with which Roman orgies abound. The company marched, rebelled, suffered and went ape when faced with the naughty ladies. The score blazed, roared, and with the Bolshoi orchestra under Pavel Sorokin, sounded almost like music.