The main people behind the establishment of the theater were Maxim Gorky, Maria Andreyeva, Alexander Blok and Anatoly Lunacharsky.

Gorky, Blok, Adreeva and Lunacharsky—who was People's Commissar of Enlightenment after the revolution—had similarly worked towards the aim of staging the classics for the masses.

The theater produced mostly classical romantic dramas like Don Carlos (1919), Othello (1920), King Lear (1920), Twelfth Night (1921), Ruy Blas (1921), The Robbers (1919), and Le Médecin malgré lui (1921).

[3] Since the mid-1920s the theater added to its repertoire plays of German expressionists including Gas by Georg Kaiser, Virgin Forest by Ernst Toller, and, influenced by expressionism, Machine Mutiny (Bunt Mashin) by Alexey Tolstoy.

The theater was producing mainly spectacles of Soviet dramaturges, including Boris Lavrenev (Razlom, 1927), Vladimir Kirshon (Gorod Vetrov, 1928); Yury Olesha (Zagovor chuvstv, 1929), Nikolai Pogodin (Moy drug, 1932).

The leaders of the theater frequently changed, the level of performances lowered and the numbers of theater-goes dramatically decreased.

Among other famous performances are: The prominent members of his troupe included Alisa Freindlich, Zinaida Sharko, Lyudmila Makarova, Tatiana Doronina, Svetlana Kryuchkova, Kirill Lavrov, Innokenty Smoktunovsky, Pavel Luspekaev, Yefim Kopelyan, Sergey Yursky, Vladislav Strzhelchik, Evgeny Lebedev, and Oleg Basilashvili.

Among them were Intrigue and Love by Friedrich Schiller (1990), Macbeth by William Shakespeare (1995), Antigone by Jean Anouilh (1996), and Boris Godunov by Alexander Pushkin (1998).

Temur Chkheidze has announced that his resignation 'opens the door for a change at the theatre' he does not feel capable of introducing himself.