Palace of Culture
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Palace of Culture was the name for major club-houses in the former Soviet Union. The Soviet meaning for the term "club" 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.
All these were supposed to aid "cultural leisure" of Soviet workers and children and to fight "cultureless leisure", such as drinking and hooliganism. All hobby groups were free of charge until most recent times, when many hobbies with less official recognition were housed basing on "self-repayment".
Palaces or Houses of Culture have been introduced in the early days of the Soviet Union. Below is an excerpt from John Dewey's Impressions of Soviet Russia.
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 unions.
Palaces of Culture served another important purpose: they housed local congresses and conferences of the regional divisions of the Communist Party.
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.
[edit] 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.
