In 1941 the Alma-Ata government puppet theatre of Kazakhstan had a problem with Lilliputians. Nadezhda Pavlovna Amori, director of the recently formed theatre in the young Soviet capital, wrote a letter to the Management of Artistic Affairs of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic to complain that, when touring, her puppet theatre frequently ran into private theatre troupes across the Kazakh steppe. One such act called themselves ‘The Illusionist Apollo and the Lilliputians’, although it seemed the latter were simply small children. Elsewhere, a family circus, the Vinogradovs, boasted a puppet theatre, lions and bears. The lions, Amori wrote, never appeared, the bears did nothing but fuss and struggle, and there were only three puppets, which she described as ‘disgusting’. The director worried that these hacks endangered her own troupe’s pedagogical and political work.

On 10 October 1935 the People’s Commissariat for Education of the Kazakh SSR had declared that a puppet theatre be established for the extracurricular education of children, with a budget of 14,000 rubles. By March 1936 the troupe was already collecting reviews – and good ones – from schools, collective farms and workers’ organisations they had visited around Kazakhstan.

In light of the struggles of most citizens to simply stay alive during a period of famine and forced collectivisation, the government’s establishment of the puppet theatre seems surprising. Yet the Alma-Ata theatre was but one of many government puppet theatres founded during the 1930s: the official theatres in Yerevan, Baku and Kazan all trace their origins to this period.

The theatres were in line with a Soviet commitment to use this form of popular entertainment to educate the masses, and particularly children, on socialist principles. During the early Soviet period the Russian carnival puppet Petrushka – an adaptation of the Italian Pulcinella tradition that would become known as ‘Punch’ in England – was adopted by Soviet puppet theatres. Praised for his (pre-Revolutionary) anti-authoritarian stance, he nonetheless appeared in books encouraging children to attend Soviet nurseries.

Puppetry was also an inspiration to avant-garde theatre-makers such as the director Vsevolod Meyerhold, and artists including Nina Simonovich-Efimova, who worked to establish it as high art. Children’s culture more broadly was a place where innovative writers, artists and theatre makers were active: as socialist realism took over adult literature, children’s literature was the only place where experimental writers such as the absurdist poet Daniil Kharms could publish work.

Puppetry was not new to Central Asia: Uzbek, Tajik and Kazakh traditions included their own forms, distinct from the Russian traditions. The Kazakh orteke, for example, little resembled the hand puppet Petrushka. Orteke puppets were carved wooden figures – most often a goat – with a mechanism to animate them while playing traditional Kazakh music. This form, modern puppeteers believe, was suppressed by Soviet authorities because it was considered too spiritual due to its links to Zoroastrianism. Kazakh identity was, nonetheless, still present in the Alma-Ata theatre. The theatre was always bilingual: at first, it consisted of two troupes, one Russian-speaking and one Kazakh-speaking. The Kazakh troupe performed a play about Aldar Kose, a traditional Kazakh folk hero who cheats the rich to help the poor. Other early productions included a Soviet adaptation of The Wizard of Oz and a puppet version of a beloved Chekhov story about a dog, Kashtanka.

Early audience reviews were full of praise for the theatre’s efforts in ‘re-educating’ its viewers, which seem to have included not only children but workers as well. Writing in 1936, the director of a school for machinists in Berëzovskii, East Kazakhstan, impressed by what he had seen, made an impassioned plea for someone to come and help them set up their own theatre:

We live in such faraway places, that no theatre has ever visited us … and we were for the first time able to see the puppet theatre in Kazakh language … those who watched the spectacle from the workers collectives were very happy with the visit of the puppet theatre.

In 1940 Amori boasted that ‘both collectives of the theatre have significantly grown in the last half year and could develop further’ – were it not, she explained, for lack of space. This was a frequent complaint; it seems that during these years the troupe was constantly moved from one place to another, sometimes sharing space with the Uighur Theatre or at the House of Pioneers (a Soviet youth centre for extracurricular learning), but never given a theatre of their own. Rehearsals and performances were interrupted by others’ meetings; props and sets were left outside and ruined in the rain. Amori held that it was only the theatre workers’ love of the theatre and their sincere wish to entertain children that prevented them from quitting.

Before a separate space for the theatre could be built, let alone more be established across the Kazakh SSR, it seems that the outbreak of the Second World War brought the troupes’ work to a temporary halt. It was revived through the work of the State Theatre for Children and Youth of Kazakhstan in 1944, but it was not until 1967 that an independent puppet theatre re-emerged in Alma-Ata, where it eventually found a home near Panfilov Park, in the heart of the city.

Over the course of the 20th century puppetry became increasingly institutionalised. While earlier puppet artists came from all manner of professions, puppetry became a subject one could study at art school as a degree. By 2012 the theatre in Almaty (the city’s name was changed to the Kazakh form in 1993) had more than 20 full-time puppeteers, a large team of puppet-makers and a complex staff of administrators. During my first year of ethnographic fieldwork there, the theatre building was undergoing a massive renovation and the puppeteers again found themselves in a temporary rehearsal space, at the city zoo. The renovation prompted directors to push for new plays and approaches to puppetry. Nonetheless, performances after the renovation included reworked versions of old classics, such as Aldar Kose and Kashtanka.

Meghanne Barker is Lecturer in Education, Practice and Society at University College London.