Manon van de Water's Moscow Theatres for Young People: A Cultural History of Ideological Coercion and Artistic Innovation, 1917–2000 assesses the achievements of theatre for children and youth in Russia from the revolutionary era to the present, with a focus upon two of the longest-running theatres in Moscow, the Central Children's Theatre (now RAMT) and the Moscow Theatre for the Young Spectator, or Mtiuz. While Soviet theatre for children has received some scholarly attention—see, for instance, Through the Magic Curtain: Theatre for Children, Adolescents and Young Adults in the USSR, translated and edited by Miriam Morton (1979), and, more recently, Russian Children's Literature and Culture, ed. Marina Balina and Larissa Rudova (2007)—there is little work on the more recent period. Van de Water's most obvious contribution is her attempt to account for more recent history: approximately two-thirds of the book are devoted to a discussion of how theatre for children and young people in Soviet Russia, originally conceived of as an instrument for inculcating and legitimizing a totalitarian ideology, was transformed in the posttotalitarian, transideological contexts of perestroika and glasnost and the end of the Soviet Union.

Trained in Europe and in the United States, and currently teaching in the theatre department at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (where she also directs plays for children), van de Water lived and worked in the Soviet Union before, during, and after glasnost and perestroika. This background gives her a unique perspective on her material. Moreover, she makes ample and effective use of both Russian and American published sources. In the course of doing research for the latter part of the book she attended many performances and interviewed a number of theatre personnel, both of which served to enrich her scholarly research.

The book is divided into three parts. The first part covers the “Soviet period,” essentially up to the Gorbachev era. Chapter 1 provides background on Marxism–Leninism and an overview of relevant Soviet politics and culture. Chapter 2 reviews the development of theatre for children and young people in Russia, describing a few developments prior to 1917; rapid realization in the revolutionary period and during the 1920s New Economic Policy, which saw a great deal of experimentation and artistic innovation; and entrenchment, ideological uniformity, and eventual stagnation under Stalin. Chapter 3 looks at theatre in relation to the “thaw” under Khruschev in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and recalls its fate during the “freeze” under Brezhnev from approximately 1964 to 1987.

The second part of the book focuses on perestroika and glasnost, with one chapter devoted to general trends and chapters on the Central Children's Theatre and the Moscow Theatre of the Young Spectator. The final part of the book, entitled “A New Millennium,” explores ways in which theatre for children and youth has adapted to the new “material circumstances” (an overused term in the book) of post-Soviet Russia. Here again, she looks closely at the same two Moscow theatres, with detailed discussions of their artistic directors and their recent repertory.

In terms of framing, van de Water relies heavily on cultural theorist Claude Lefort and employs his notion of an “invisible ideology” as a means for analyzing cultural developments in a supposedly postideological age. She also uses Mikhail Epstein's concept of “culturology” as a lens for theorizing an ideological environment created by competing ideologies, as under perestroika, glasnost, and beyond. The historical and theoretical backgrounds make the book accessible to a readership not familiar with the Soviet context. Highlighting this background also strengthens van de Water's arguments about the relationship between theatre and the Soviet regime.

Tracing a line from the early history to the postperestroika and glasnost period, one finds a circular pattern: theatre for young people in Soviet Russia began with efforts to create a “theatrical-literate spectator” (50) but under Stalin's regime began to function primarily to create a spectator who had been properly educated in an ideological sense. During perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness), and after the fall of the Soviet Union, Russian theatre for the young had to find a new role for itself and has largely returned to its original mission of creating audiences for the best of Russian theatre. The difference from the early Soviet period is that theatre for young people is now fervently anti-ideological in its emphasis (itself an expression of ideology, or of competing ideologies, we are reminded) and more attuned to the darker realities of youth culture.

Van de Water finds that theatres for young people struggled to be relevant in a posttotalitarian context, and often floundered, especially as young people gained access to Western media that seemed more in line with their sensibilities. To become more relevant, theatres had to acknowledge Russian youth not simply as “builders of socialism” but as young people struggling with real problems and concerns. The two theatres studied responded quite differently to changed circumstances: the Central Children's Theatre largely kept to old models with moralizing, if not explicitly ideological, plays that appealed to a family audience, whereas the Mtiuz distinguished itself as an art theatre that produced cutting-edge, controversial plays that often neglected the theatre's original mission of reaching young children.

While nearly every chapter includes a section on pedagogy and the pedagogical sections within particular theatres, I would have liked it if van de Water had been able to offer more discussion of what theatre would have meant within the broader experiences of Russian children. We do learn that during the Soviet period children mostly visited theatres as part of mandatory school field trips; in a later period they tended to go with their parents. We do get some sense of theatre's importance to the Soviet regime, given the resources they invested in it; but while we are told that children were regularly interviewed and asked to respond to questionnaires after performances, and often created their own dramatic responses to theatrical productions, we don't get a real sense of those responses, which presumably are available in archives. It would likewise have been useful to have a bit more about Soviet children's literature—which clearly influenced Soviet theatre for young people—and the Soviet educational program as a whole. Finally, although the author is clearly most interested in the later period, the earlier chapters feel more effectively synthesized, with selective discussion of specific plays. Later chapters offer wonderfully detailed readings of several plays, but sometimes move from one description to the next without an adequate framework. Despite these minor criticisms, the book should be of value to scholars of Russian and Soviet culture, theatre specialists, and those interested in children's culture.