Soviet and Western histories of the Soviet theater often
sound like the histories of theater in two entirely different
countries. Official Soviet theater historians see the develop-
ment of theater and drama since the Revolution as a struggle
for a socialist repertoire and style of production in the face
of the corruption of this aim by formalists and bourgeois de-
cadents devoted to the doctrine of art for art's sake. Every
new decree or pronouncement by the government or the Com-
munist Party on the subject of theatrical spectacles is re-
garded by these writers as another advance in the continuing
process of defining the role of art in a socialist society. Each
new play which satisfactorily expresses the political aims of
the moment is viewed as another step toward the realization
of the desired goal: a theater which furthers the aims of the
state and the Party.

To such historians the years since 1917 provide a progres-
sive revelation of the rules for socialist art in the theater.
The triumphs are all at the expense of the prerevolutionary
theater, which is officially regarded as a theater for the elite,
a theater more interested in form than content, a theater
whose content was as doomed as the class it entertained.
One Soviet writer, willing to take something from each of the
giants of the pre-Soviet theater, nevertheless dismisses
Stanislavski as too "mystic" and Meierhold and Tairov as
too "aesthetic" for the new socialist theater. ¹ The aim of
the new theater, according to the official view, has been to
bring the heritage of the classics to the masses and to create
new plays to teach the people how to behave in the new so-
ciety. The classics, of course, are selected and reinterpreted

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