Gab es eine „politische Ökonomie des sozialistischen Realismus“? Die Basis des stalinistischen Kulturmanagements und der Überbau der „sowjetischen Oper“ am Beispiel des Moskauer Bolschoi-Theaters (1930er Jahre)

Themenportal Europäische Geschichte. 2022. P. 1–16.

Golovlev A.

In this essay, theatre management and economic structure in the Bolshoi Theatre are investigated, firstly as elements of Stalinist cultural policies, and secondly as an expression of the Bolshoi’s institutional and economic subjectivity. Promoted to the stage of “Soviet opera”, and failing this task, the house nevertheless developed a highly functional and numerically efficient economy, based on a larger number of performances and a higher attendance rate than most other European cases. As it emerges from the Bolshoi’s financial reports, economies of scale explain much of the theatre’s economic performativity. At the same time, salaries remained unequal and often modest, and premieres extremely rare. Moreover, despite external inflationary pressures of the economy of industrialisation, the Bolshoi showed remarkable organisational resilience. Its central position in the Stalinist cultural outlook undoubtedly secured it the attention from the party-state, creating a unique cultural and economic object within the Soviet cultural industry: very expensive and privileged, yet performing better than most of its contemporaries, in democracies and dictatorships alike.

Keywords: экономика культуры, cultural economics, История сталинизма, History of Stalinism, Большой театр, Bolshoi Theatre