Theatre Policies of Soviet Communism and Italian Fascism Compared, 1920-1940s

New Theatre Quarterly. 2019. Vol. 35. No. 4. P. 312–324.

Golovlev A.

n this article Alexander Golovlev offers a comparative examination of the theatre policies
of Fascist Italy and Stalinist Soviet Union. He argues that, although the two regimes
shared parallel time frames and gravitated around similar institutional solutions, Italian
Fascism was fundamentally different in its reluctance to destroy the privately based
theatre structure in favour of a state theatre and to impose a unified style, while Stalin
carried out an ambitious and violent campaign to instil socialist realism through continuous disciplining, repression, and institutional supervision. In pursuing a nearly identical goal of
achieving full obedience, the regimes used different means, and obtained similarly mixed
results. While the Italian experience ended with the defeat of Fascism, Soviet theatres
underwent de-Stalinization in the post-war decades, indicating the potential for sluggish
stability in such frameworks of cultural-political control.

Keywords: тоталитаризм, Stalinism, сталинизм, история театра, итальянский фашизм, Italian Fascism, totalitarianism, theatre history