While many studies of the early Soviet theater have focused upon its proletarian or revolutionary stages, in the polemics of that era a central topic of dispute was the so-called academic stage. The academic theaters of Moscow and Petrograd, which included the former imperial theaters as well as select representatives of the pre-revolutionary private stage, most notably the Arts and Kamernyi theaters, had no lack of critics or enemies in the years after October. The former court theaters were attacked as politically dangerous relics of the old regime, their artists were envied for their material privileges and status, their large budgets were coveted by less generously funded workers' and avant-garde stages, their art was condemned as conservative and out of harmony with the revolution and socialism. For Commissar of Education Anatolii Lunacharskii, however, these theaters were academies which would both preserve the best of the pre-revolutionary cultural heritage and provide standards of technical excellence against which more innovative theaters could be measured.