1989 Reports

Revolution in the Soviet Theater

Law, Alma

A revolution is under way in the Soviet theater. There has been nothing like it since the turbulent years following the 1917 October Revolution, when all the arts were pressed into service by the nascent Soviet state. The past three years under Mikhail Gorbachev have seen an unprecedented shift toward a much more flexible approach to the arts, allowing for greater “ideological and moral elasticity.” While the dogma of socialist culture has hardly been abandoned, its definition has been considerably broadened to include the kind of rich diversity that characterized the arts in the first decade following the Revolution.!