Palace of Culture ( , ,
wénhuà gōng) or House of Culture (dom
kultury) was the name for major club-houses in the former Soviet Union
and the rest of the Eastern
bloc. It was an establishment for all kinds of
recreational activities and
hobbies:
sports,
collecting,
arts, etc., and the Palace of Culture was
designed to have room for all kinds of them. A typical Palace
contained one or several
cinema halls,
concert hall(s), dance studios (
folk
dance,
ballet,
ballroom dance), various
do-it-yourself hobby groups,
amateur radio groups, amateur theatre studios,
amateur musical studios and bands,
lectoriums (lecture
halls), and many more. Groups were also subdivided by age of
participants, from children to retirees.A
public library may sometimes have been housed
in the Palace of Culture as well. All hobby groups were free of
charge until most recent times, when many hobbies with less
official recognition were housed based on "self-repayment". A
Palace of Culture was sometimes called a "club", but this did not
mean that it was membership-based.
In government rhetoric, all these were supposed to aid "cultural
leisure" of Soviet workers and children and to fight "cultureless
leisure", such as
drinking and
hooliganism.
Palaces or Houses of Culture were introduced in the early days of
the Soviet Union, inheriting the role that was earlier fulfilled by
so-called "People's Houses" ( ). Below is an excerpt from
John Dewey's
Impressions of Soviet Russia and
the revolutionary world (1929) .
The other impression I would record came from a
non-official visit to a House of Popular Culture. Here was a fine
new building in the factory quarter, surrounded by recreation
grounds, provided with one large theater, four smaller assembly
halls, fifty rooms for club meetings, recreation and games,
headquarters for trade unions, costing two million dollars,
frequented daily—or rather, nightly—by five thousand persons as a
daily average. Built and controlled, perhaps, by the government?
No, but by the voluntary efforts of the trade unions, who tax
themselves two percent of their wages to afford their collective
life these facilities. The House is staffed and managed by its own
elected officers. The contrast with the comparative inactivity of
our own working men and with the quasi-philanthropic quality of
similar enterprises in my own country left a painful impression. It
is true that this House—there is already another similar one in
Leningrad—has no intrinsic and necessary connection with
communistic theory and practice. The like of it might exist in any
large modern industrial center. But there is the fact that the like
of it does not exist in the other and more highly developed
industrial centers. There it is in Leningrad, as it is not there in
Chicago or New York...
There were two basic categories of Palaces of Culture: of
state ownership and of
enterprise ownership. Every town,
kolkhoz and
sovkhoz had a
central Palace or House of Culture. Major industrial enterprises
had their own Palaces of Culture, managed by the corresponding
trade union.
Palaces of Culture served another important purpose: they housed
local congresses and conferences of the regional divisions of the
Communist Party,
the
Komsomol, etc.
In smaller rural settlements similar establishments of lesser scope
were known as "clubs", with main activities there being dance
nights and cinema.
In 1988 there were over 137,000 club establishments in the Soviet
Union.
In the
People's
Republic of China
, the best-known, and most centrally located, Palace
of Culture is perhaps the "Workers' Palace of Culture" located in
the former Imperial Ancestral Temple
just outside the Forbidden City
in Beijing.
Post-Soviet times
Most Palaces of Culture continue to exist after the
collapse of the Soviet Union,
but their status, especially the financial one, changed
significantly, for various reasons.
See also
References
(Poland)
(Romania)
(Sofia, Bulgaria)
,
Nicaragua
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