You are a sentimental lot," said Tom Stoppard (pictured, right) as he watched the first night of his trilogy, "The Coast of Utopia", in Moscow in October. The production begins and ends with a song, an old 19th-century romance, something about the dreams and shadows of the past, about the memory that erases the faces of loved ones but preserves the sounds of their voices-indeed a sentimental Russian affair.

A young woman in a simple, white 19th-century dress sings it quietly and clearly while polishing wine glasses at a family dinner-table. The scene is bathed in warm summer-evening light and the poetry of a country estate. There is no mention of this song in the text. It comes from the director, Alexei Borodin. "It is my favourite romance-I used to play it to my sisters." The world created by Stoppard's imagination Borodin recognises as his own: the song, like a thread, connects the two.

The plays have been successfully staged in London and in New York, where the production collected seven Tony awards. The Russian version is different from the intellectually and emotionally engaging London performance or the sleek and energised New York one. In Moscow the lyrical notes introduced by the director have turned an epic trilogy that spans several decades and countries into a Russian affair that a Russian audience takes to heart.

Afterwards, the spectators argue not about the merits of the production, but about what has been said on stage. This surprises Stoppard: "It is as if people are responding to statements. They seem to imply that my plays fill some sort of gap—I don't quite believe it." He should.

From the moment Stoppard responded to the letter which led to my translating the plays into Russian, he talked about his fantasy of seeing them performed in Russia-"as a test for the play and a homage to the culture which inspired it". He wanted to know how his Russian characters, many of whom died in exile, would be received at home. In fact, bringing the plays to Russia turned out to be as much of a test for the country as it was for the plays.

Russian theatre was not receptive to the idea behind the trilogy. The characters, Russian liberal thinkers of the 19th century, had been appropriated by Soviet ideology and evoked a yawn or resentment-often both. A few young and fashionable directors read the plays and turned them down. The chance of success was low; the investment in time and commitment too high. But then Borodin, artistic director of the Russian National Youth Theatre, read the trilogy and felt that he had to do it—that he could not not do it. It took courage and honesty. He had both.

Borodin (pictured, above) is neither glamorous nor cutting-edge. In his thick-frame glasses and pressed shirts he looks more like an academic, than a theatre director. He is rarely spotted in Moscow society. His audience comes to the show by metro, not by chauffeur-driven Mercedes.

He worked on the trilogy for two years with a conviction and zeal that left many of his colleagues bewildered. The stage of the 19th-century theatre next to the Bolshoi seemed too small for the trilogy and its 60-odd characters, so Borodin extended it. A wooden platform, like the deck of a ship, breaks into the auditorium and cuts into the first few rows.

On this deck, Stoppard's characters spend ten hours and the best part of their lives. Here they fall in love, scrap over the taste of coffee and the course of Russian history; wrestle with the philosophical questions of their day and struggle to express love. Here the sun sets over the idyllic country estate that belonged to the father of Russia's first anarchist, Mikhail Bakunin, as Vissarion Belinsky, the literary critic, tries to work out the meaning of art. Here Alexander Herzen suffers the loss of his seven-year-old son, who drowns at sea, and has his beliefs in human nature crushed first by the French revolution, then (posthumously) by the Russian one.

Amid the vanity and din of modern Russian culture, it all seems a bit incongruous. The characters with their long speeches, old-fashioned sentiments and compassion do not fit easily into modern Russia. The performance does not fit the formula for success: no glamour, no farce, no cannibalism, no post-modern twist.

Yet the audience's enthusiasm on the opening night defied the critics' predictions of failure. As the curtain fell, the house feted the actors, the director and the playwright with ovations, flowers and curtain calls. There were tears and elation backstage. Young actors danced the can-can and lifted the 66-year-old Borodin into the air. It was not just a celebration of two years of work, but also of an important victory, an act of defiance, vindication of the idea that Russian theatre should be more than just entertainment.

Belinsky would have been cheering louder than anyone. The man who first sparked Stoppard's interest in the 19th-century Russian thinkers saw the importance of literature not in its artistic form or its civic duty, but in its power to reveal the truth about life-its meaning and purpose. "What kind of literature and what kind of life is the same question," as Belinsky says in the play.

It is still the same in Russia today. Borodin's production has everything to do with modern Russian life, its ideas and ideals, its comprehension of the past and contemplation of the future. "In other countries", Belinsky says, "the advance of civilised behaviour is everybody's business. In Russia, there is no division of labour, literature has to do it all."

That leaves Belinsky and Herzen with plenty to do. They have arrived on Russia's shores just as the history of Russian thought is up for grabs, when a fight is raging for the country's identity and for its past. Everything Herzen detested is being resurrected: censorship, the autocracy of the Russian state, a macabre union of Orthodoxy, nationalism and authoritarianism. After almost 15 years of a democratic experiment following the collapse of Communism, Russia's middle class is voluntarily surrendering personal liberties for a notional stability just as the French did in 1848. As one of the audience declared, "I feel that this production is so up to date that it could be shut down."

Russian state ideologists are hard at work trying to persuade themselves and the country that democracy and respect for individual rights and liberty are of no use to its people, that Russia always prospered when it was ruled by despotic tsars and that there is nothing in Russian history to be embarrassed about. The characters have returned to a country where their dreams about justice and freedom evoke mostly sneers, whereas Nicholas I, one of Russia's most senseless autocrats, evokes sympathy and respect. "I'd love to read an article by Herzen, with his lacerating wit, about contemporary Russia," Stoppard says.

Russian history has never been kind to Herzen and his circle. Isaiah Berlin, who inspired Stoppard's interest in Herzen, wrote that "the singular irony of history was that Herzen—who wanted individual liberty more than happiness, or efficiency or justice, and denounced organised planning, economic centralisation and governmental authority—was canonised by the Soviet government, whose genesis he understood better and feared more than Dostoyevsky did."

But the Soviet system did not just distort these men's ideas. It did its best to wipe out the type of people who looked to their ideas for guidance. During the Soviet period, Russia still produced intellectual giants and great writers. It had its Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn, but it squeezed out the close reader of Belinsky's pulsating articles and Herzen's unhurried memoirs, the person who shared their sentiments and their rejection of enslavement (whichever form it takes): an educated middle class.

The Soviet and post-Soviet eras also deformed the language that expressed those sentiments. Words such as "honour" and "duty" were first extolled and abused by the Communists then turned into a joke by their successors. Stoppard's trilogy has not only taken off layers of bronze paint from Herzen or Belinsky and brought them back to life, it has rehabilitated their language.

But it needed someone to make these words and ideas their own—to translate them onto the stage and into life. Why did Alexei Borodin take on that role? Why did he respond to the plays that left so many of his colleagues cold? Perhaps because he possesses the qualities needed to stage them, because they celebrated liberty, individualism and compassion, which resonated with his own life.

Borodin was born and grew up in China, in a good, ordinary family that preserved the ethos and instincts of Russia's pre-revolutionary middle class. When he was 14 years old, he was "replanted" into native Russian soil-and took roots. For the past 50 years he has lived in Russia, according to the principles he learnt from his parents and from Russian literature. His immune system was strong enough to survive the Soviet experiment and resist post-Soviet compromises.

At the end of the trilogy, Herzen says: "Our meaning is in how we live in an imperfect world, in our time. We have no other." It is a sentiment that is close to Borodin's heart. He is now calling back Russian thinkers from their exile. His production of Stoppard's trilogy is an attempt to awaken the dormant genes that were once common in educated Russian men. But the genes of fear and enslavement are dormant too and can just as easily be awakened.

His production is part of a cultural foundation on which a new educated middle class could rise up. The prime audience of the youth theatre included his own children and grandchildren. Many of the spectators grew up in post-Communist Russia. Which past they choose will determine Russia's future.

An old black-and-white family film captures little girls in neat dresses with large ribbons, and an open-faced seven-year-old boy with big ears and an even bigger smile. Someone carries out a samovar into the garden. Three sisters and a brother, a perfect Chekhovian set; a two-storey house with a large garden; seven Chinese servants; Russian books and songs; and dreams of going to Moscow, where none of the family had ever been ... The year is 1948. A new wave of Stalinist repression is spreading through the Soviet Union, consuming Jewish doctors, scientists, artists and the newly repatriated. But the Borodins live in a world tied to 19th-century Russia, even as the country their grandparents and parents left behind has been racked by social upheaval.

Borodin's family did not know the horrors of the civil war, the blood of the revolution, the all-pervasive fear of Stalin's great terror, or the brutal collectivisation. His father was born in Russia, but had left before the Bolshevik revolution, and his mother had never been to the country. Their house was in the French concession and Borodin's first school was a Catholic college, St Jeanne D'Arc. To Borodin, Russia was the best country in the world. It was Utopia with Russian books and Russian films.

Soviet films were shown in a Soviet sports club which opened towards the end of the war. They depicted the cornucopia of Soviet life that made his longing for Russia all the stronger. After one film, he refused to ride home in a rickshaw, and walked. After reading a book about Alexander Matrosov-a 19-year-old soldier who died heroically for the Motherland and for Stalin-he put up a poster in his room, of Stalin with the Motherland in the background: "The Soviet country-like some sunny city-is calling, luring, looming in the distance."

The dream of returning to the Soviet Union was shared by many Russian émigrés, inspired both by war-time patriotism and by Stalin's call for repatriation. Soviet consulates started to issue Soviet passports to those who had emigrated before the revolution. In 1949 the thought of moving became more urgent when Mao's army took over Shanghai.

A good man at the Soviet consulate persuaded the Borodins not to rush back—to let the children grow up and to settle their business affairs. He knew more than he could let on, and he probably saved Borodin's life. In 1949 a ship with Russian repatriates left Shanghai and the Borodins went to see it off. "We envied them so much, lucky souls, they were going home." They were not to know that many of those on board were sent straight to the gulag, where some of them would perish. The Borodins did not receive permission to enter the Soviet Union until 1953, the year of Stalin's death. "When I was told that we got our visas, I thought I would die of happiness. My mother said she would get drunk and climb onto the table." That day there was a party in Borodin's house for all their Shanghai friends. His mother was in a red evening-dress, while Uncle Kolya sang songs about the Motherland.

They occupied two carriages: one for the family and one for their belongings-leather chairs, mahogany cabinets, hand-woven carpets and a grand piano. The train went through Manchuria to Kazakhstan, where the Borodins were supposed to live and work the virgin land. The first station after crossing the border was Otpor, which in Russian means repulse. A drunk lying on the platform ("Mama, look, there is an ill man on the platform. We must help him"), the smell of cheap cigarettes and vodka, the dusty Kazakh steppe-all this seemed different from the free and sunny country of their dreams.

For the first year they stayed in Chimkent, a concrete town in Kazakhstan, which had served as a transit point for millions of prisoners bound for the gulag, and shared a flat with their Shanghai friends at the back of the Operetta theatre. The memory is still fresh of the dark auditorium, where a special sofa was put in front of the house for the children, and the magic of the first night; the evenings spent by the radio listening to "Anna Karenina".

After a year in Kazakhstan they moved to Moscow. "The first thing our mother did when we came here was to take us to the Sparrow Hills (pictured, below). There is a photograph of us all standing here in our white dresses." Natalia Nikolaeva, one of Borodin's three sisters, tells me this as we drive past the Sparrow Hills with Tom Stoppard. It was one of the first places in Moscow where Stoppard had asked to be taken when he came four years ago. There Herzen and Nikolai Ogarev, both 13, made their famous pledge to avenge the Decembrists. "We ran up and saw all the roofs and cupolas of the city shining in the setting sun and suddenly embraced and made a sacred vow..."

The Borodins could have bought a flat in the centre of Moscow, but instead they moved into a wooden house with a mezzanine and two large stoves in Pushkino, a few miles from Moscow on the banks of the quiet Klyazma river. (The area was once popular with rich Russian capitalists.) It was a substitute for the Shanghai mansion.

The Russian language does not distinguish between a house and a home, but the Borodins definitely had a home, full of the rituals that are the pulse of daily life. All three sisters joined in Alexei's home-theatre (their grandmother made the costumes). There were still the family meals at the oval table, the cakes for Easter; the white, starched tablecloth; the floor-polishing every Sunday. But the servants belonged back in China, so now this was family work. Borodin's father found a job as an engineer in a factory, his mother translated from English. Money was short, but "our parents did everything they could to preserve this atmosphere of home which was so important to us."

Borodin's student friends who visited the house recall its Chekhovian feel and its openness. It was a place where people talked, argued, sang till the small hours. The house was not cut off. "My parents knew exactly what country they lived in, but they managed to preserve some basic principles. I remember my father used to repeat, 'how do you stop the grind of broken life?'." The sound of "grinding life" is distinct in Stoppard's trilogy and Chekhov's plays.

As Chekhov knew best, the tectonic breaks, the "grind of history", begin with cracks in family estates and the disappearance of a family home. That sense of home in Stoppard's trilogy, in Chekhov's plays and in Borodin's life is inseparable from its loss. First the Borodins sold what they had brought from China. Then, after the death of the parents, they sold the house. Yet, even after the house was gone, the mutual support and reliance on each other remained.

By that time Borodin was finishing drama school and directing his diploma production in Smolensk. The season of 1967-68 was one of the hardest for him and for the country. His first production, based on a story by a soon-to-be émigré writer, Vladimir Voinovich, was denounced as "avant-garde" and "blasphemous". His second, "The Glass Menagerie" by Tennessee Williams, got the artistic director of the Smolensk theatre fired. Then he received the worst news of all: his mother had died. "Our world collapsed overnight, suddenly we were on our own, faced with reality."

"Reality" was the winter of 1968, the end of the post-Stalin thaw. Within a few months, Soviet tanks rolled into Prague. The world of Borodin's family and the Russian intelligentsia were invaded too. "If it hadn't been for my sisters, my wife, the friends of my parents, I would probably have broken down. I realised that the only meaning in life is not to lose oneself-that is the most important thing." Borodin does not talk about "dignity", "strength", "duty": these words are part of his nature, not his vocabulary.

As a young director Borodin was sent away to Vyatka, a good 18th-century merchants' town that had once been Herzen's place of exile. And just as it was for Herzen, those years were the happiest for Borodin. "I had my home and my theatre, my theatre and my home, my theatre-home." Borodin wanted to create an accessible and artistic theatre that would enlighten people's lives. "I always tell this story I invented about a life on a plantation: you have your own furrow and you chop along it-chop, chop. You raise your eyes and see that your furrow ends beyond a horizon, you lower your eyes and chop again."

After several years of chopping away in Vyatka, he was invited to Moscow to head the Central Theatre for Children in 1980. The building had once housed a salon where Herzen's father probably attended society balls. A century later it was given over to the theatre led by Chekhov's nephew and which was shut down by Stalin in 1936, the year Herzen's daughter died. After the war the theatre became a haven—and an exile—for talented actors and directors rejected by "grown up" theatres. (Many of them would lead the regeneration of Russian theatre after Stalin's death.) The Central Theatre for Children was right in the centre of Moscow, yet, somehow preserved its autonomy. Borodin tried to keep it that way.

The country was in deep, and, it seemed at the time, permanent stagnation. Yet, the theatre life of those years was rich in talent. Its artistic energy seemed to compensate for the lack of movement in politics or the economy. When in 1983 Borodin staged a two-evening long adaptation of Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables" it was a burst of energy, but also of romanticism and compassion. "I always firmly believed that theatre is only interesting when it counteracts life, not when it serves it or tries to adjust to it."

Borodin's theatre, like his home, never tried to cut itself off from life outside. When Communism collapsed Moscow's central street turned into one big flea market, where elderly people, impoverished overnight, were selling everything that they could, from a carton of milk to old clothes. Borodin remembers seeing the funeral of an actor in a theatre across the square from his. "The coffin was lifted from a hearse and carried into the theatre. Immediately, the hearse was taken over by street traders selling underwear."

Borodin's response was to stage Racine's "Bérénice", a 17th-century classical tragedy about duty, written in Alexandrine verse. It had seemingly no connection to what was going on outside his theatre's windows. But he saw it as the responsibility of art to bring order and structure to a world that was falling apart in front of his eyes.

Today Russian life is solidifying into a rigid, complacent and stagnant structure. It is the moment to stage Stoppard's trilogy about romantic revolutionaries and Utopian thinkers. "I needed this play like air, with its heightened sense of justice and his uncompromising, rebellious characters," Borodin says. "I don't know where we are moving, but I think I can distinguish between black and white, between what is true and what is false, between honour and baseness. I don't want to hear that I should take something into consideration, that baseness or villainy are not really baseness and villainy and that it is all temporary and will lead to some common good."

Borodin's production is an antidote to the poisonous atmosphere in Russia's public life, to the constant shifting of right and wrong. It is a reminder that there was a time when patriotism did not translate into xenophobia, when pragmatism did not justify dishonour and when irony did not rule out love for your country. "I can say Russia is a great country with gaiety, but I can't say it with a straight face. In fact, saying it loudly means you don't love it really."

Borodin's theatre was never a symbol of resistance nor a stronghold of opposition. It was an oasis of intelligence and a stronghold of decency. Rather than being elitist, it worked in the mainstream of Russian culture and was accessible to all and responsive to the life outside the theatre.

Borodin is not a fighter. But his gentle manner conceals a firmness and conviction that tie him to Herzen. "I still have this naive, foolish belief that theatre can play some role in people's lives. You know, I once was walking through the empty foyer and caught myself talking aloud. I said this silly phrase: ‘nobody will divert me from my path'. It just came out of me. And then I laughed."

("The Coast of Utopia" opened in Moscow in October)

All photographs Panos Pictures