ABSTRACT
The story of the circus in the Soviet Union is, in some ways, a familiar one. The circus was already an anomaly among the revolutionary cultural products created after 1917, when “political and aesthetic revolutionaries tried to suppress the allegedly dangerous old world of commercial popular culture.” The circus was hardly the only prerevolutionary popular entertainment that the Soviet government continued to produce, and yet even among those, the circus remained exceptional. Both Soviet circuses and mass celebrations were surprisingly typical of popular and particularly carnivalesque forms of culture in other contexts, in that they did not function exclusively as modes of resistance to dominant ideologies, nor did they only enforce political compliance and social conformity. Yet its significance remained open to debate, which meant that it could attract even those viewers who might have seen it as an escape from dominant ideologies, an expression of political discontent, or a source of social disorder.
