A study in the formation and development of a Soviet government institution after the Revolution of October 1917. The commissariat - which was responsible both for education and the arts - was the main channel of communication between the government and Bolshevik party on the one hand, and the Russian intelligentsia on the other. The commissar, Anatoly Vasilyevich Lunacharsky, was, in his own words, ‘a Bolshevik among intellectuals and an intellectual among Bolsheviks’; his closest colleagues were Lenin’s wife Krupskaya and the historian Pokrovsky.