So let’s say I wanted to become a painter in the USSR how would I achieve that. I know that you could go to school for say engineering and then get assigned a job when you got out of school so did it work the same way for artistic endeavors? Or would you first get assigned a job and then in your free time pursue the artistic endeavor. Basically, were you an artist first, or where you say a steelworker who was an artist second until you got enough of a base to pursue being an artist full time?
A lot of workplaces had amateur artisitic development programmes attached. Some had acting troupes or music groups, you could develop through that and then go on to professionalism either with the whole group or by joing an established institution