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?
I mean, if you want to be a professional musician and such, you would had to have studied at a university, otherwise you could have played on your house and hope for the best, as it was the typical course of action in every country in the world at that time, with popular music.
If you look for a bit of information, there were ton of artists and organizations that supported artists during the USSR, what comes first to my mind is Andrei Tarkovsky, who is considered as one of the best and most renowned film directors in the world, I don’t know that much about classical music or Russian music in general so I couldn’t speak about that but a quick search dropped some results: