ABSTRACT
The Stalinist ideal for organizing art was that a revolutionary state should recreate culture, not just politics, by destroying all earlier forms of creativity that did not serve its own ends. This required new and more centralized institutions. Stalin fostered new corps of Soviet ballerinas, painters, musicians, and film directors, restricting the style and content of their work in exchange for state support. Beginning in the 1930s, these groups replaced previous artists who had been less subject to official controls through the mid-1920s. Mao's government inherited this Stalinist vision of how to organize art, but for many reasons implemented it less thoroughly. So in the reform period, change was quick.
