But by the mid-1970's, the company was being suffocated by East Germany's cultural bureaucracy.

Even in Lenin's time, a cultural bureaucracy began to restrain art to fit propaganda purposes.

Chagall offended the cultural bureaucracy by celebrating pre-Revolutionary Jewish themes in a whimsical style at variance with Socialist realism.

Mr. Khardzhiev survived, hiding his passions and holding to the fringes of the cultural bureaucracy.

Only after five or six months of negotiating did the cultural bureaucracy relent, he said.

But there is a more relevant question that neither the cultural bureaucracy nor its artistic dependents dare ask: Are French taxpayers getting their money's worth?

Mr. Lang controls an enormous cultural bureaucracy, and his leverage on intellectual life has been increased by his recent supplemental appointment as Minister of Education.

He was accompanied by the usual entourage of mediocre "artists" who ran the cultural bureaucracy.

A little later, alumni of those uprisings infiltrated first the lower, then the upper reaches of the French cultural bureaucracy.