​Voldemar Panso laid the foundations of established professional theatre education in 1957. Previous attempts in this area were short-lived due to political upheavals: from 1938 to 1941 the Drama School operated at the Tallinn Conservatory, after the war (1946) the Estonian State Theatre Institute was founded. The latter, however, managed to educate only three cohorts of students before being closed down in 1950 in the course of repressions directed against so called ‘bourgeois nationalism’.