This article focuses on the 1931 Berezil production of Comrade Woman, the only production at this theater created by its women, to highlight the absence of women in early Soviet Ukrainian theater and in scholarship on the Ukrainian avant-garde in general. Soviet women were engaged professionally in theater in ways previously impossible in the Russian Empire, yet they were not leaders in management or artistic direction. Their stories were not their own. Therefore, while Comrade Woman centered on a generic Soviet experience and not on the experience of the actresses themselves, the production suggests a more complex story of how actresses managed onstage work and backstage lives simply because it was the only production that women were able to lead. Rather than condemning the play as banal propaganda, this article argues that Comrade Woman shows the conservatism of the avant-garde and the need for research into women’s everyday lives as early Soviet artists in order to understand the context not only for the extraordinary innovation of the 1920s, but also for the ways in which gender roles in the early Soviet arts developed. Examining the production as well as several case studies of “comrade actresses” (Valentyna Chystiakova, Hanna Babiivna, Nataliia Uzhvii), the article offers a different narrative of Soviet Ukrainian theater from the years of war and revolution through the 1920s, focusing less on the radicalism of male innovators and more on the continuity in the long lives of actresses. The focus on actresses highlights how offstage events may have shaped what the audience saw on stage. Mark von Hagen once asked whether Ukraine has a history; this article argues that the actresses in Ukraine are part of its history and change our view of modernism in Ukraine.
Mayhill C. Fowler (2020) studied this question.