NATALIA DUDINSKAYA was one of the greatest ballerinas that Soviet Russia ever produced, and she dominated the Kirov Ballet for decades until her retirement in the 1960s. Her dazzling virtuosity thrilled audiences in Leningrad, now St Petersburg, and through her extensive teaching and coaching she helped to mould a new generation of dancers — Natalia Makarova among them — who were inspired by her technical prowess and powerful personality.

Natalia Mikhailovna Dudinskaya was born in Kharkov in 1912. Her mother, a sometime pupil of Enrico Cecchetti, ran a ballet school where her daughter took her first lessons. In 1923 she entered the Petrograd Ballet School (as it was then called), where she came under the tutelage of Agrippina Vaganova, the great pedagogue and architect of Soviet balletic training. Vaganova formed the young Dudinskaya into a virtuoso dancer of seemingly unlimited technical skill.

Before graduating in 1931, she made her debut as Princess Florine in The Sleeping Beauty. Within six months of joining the Leningrad ballet company (which was later renamed the Kirov), Dudinskaya danced Odette-Odile in the full-length Swan Lake, a gruelling role which she performed to great acclaim.

From then on her career as a top dancer was established. She took on all the traditional ballerina roles, bringing to each a facility and sparkle that delighted the ballet-going public.

In partnership with the no less astonishing male virtuoso, Vakhtang Chabukiani, Dudinskaya was seen to special advantage in the 1940 staging of La Bayadère, and a filmed extract from this suggests something of the academic clarity and glittering polish of her dancing. For her, too, Chabukiani choreographed Laurencia in 1939, creating a role whose exultant, soaring outlines typified the young ballerina’s phenomenal gifts.

During the war years Dudinskaya was evacuated with the Kirov Ballet to the Urals, and there she formed a professional partnership with Konstantin Sergeyev, whom she was to marry. Sergeyev created his Cinderella for her in 1946, and made an impressive reworking of Raymonda in which Dudinskaya was magnificently cast, and in 1957 he staged Path of Thunder for her, inspired by the South African novel about apartheid.

Among other contemporary works in which Dudinskaya was admired were The Bronze Horseman and Taras Bulba, but it was as a classical ballerina of diamond sharpness that she was most honoured, in partnership with her husband. After her retirement in the early 1960s, at the age of 52, Dudinskaya devoted herself to teaching, as professor of a perfection class at the Kirov Ballet, of which Konstantin Sergeyev was Director, and then at the Vaganova School in Leningrad (from 1964). But she continued to appear for some years in character dances in the annual school performances.

She was a brilliant and demanding teacher, able to pass on the grand precepts of Vaganova and also her own dedicated labours that had given her dancing so prodigious a technical mastery.

Her pupils included the finest products of the Leningrad school. Looking at a pas de trois which combined the just emerging talents of Natalia Makarova, Alla Sizova and Yuri Soloviev, Dudinskaya could wryly declare: “What burdens God lays on the soul!”. Makarova, who went on to enjoy a sensational career in the West, once paid tribute to Dudinskaya’s teaching, to the “will and incontrovertible authority that gave young students the stamina and prowess essential for a great career. To triumph over the body . . . this Dudinskaya taught me.”

Unlike some of her colleagues, Dudinskaya thrived in the Soviet system. She was made People’s Artist of the USSR in 1957 and appointed to the order of the Red Banner in 1973.

Dudinskaya was a woman greatly respected by those who worked with her, and revered as an artist who inspired both by the example of her performance and by her instruction. Film of her performances — as Odile; as the Fairy Carabosse in Konstantin Sergeyev’s Sleeping Beauty — convey something of her bravura. But it was, for Western observers, better to see her teaching in the Vaganova School in Leningrad, and thereby to be made aware of the 250 years of tradition that have shaped that illustrious academy. If Dudinskaya is remembered for just one thing it will be for upholding and enhancing the reputation of the Russian ballet.

Natalia Mikhailovna Dudinskaya, ballerina, was born in Kharkov, Ukraine, on August 8, 1912. She died in St Petersburg, on January 29, 2003, aged 90.