The focus of the article is on the structural and personnel aspects of the development of the management system of the art industry of the Kazakh SSR in the second half of the 1930s. It is known that since 1936 complex structural and institutional processes took place in the Soviet Union in the system of management of culture and art, when all power was transferred from the jurisdiction of the People's Commissariat of Education to the jurisdiction of the All-Union Committee for the Arts. In parallel, in the Kazakh SSR, the stage of active formation of the republican art infrastructure began, at the head of which a special department was determined — the Department of Arts under the Council of People's Commissars of the Kazakh SSR. Materials from the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RSALA) made it possible to clarify that the observed in the second half of the 1930s. The structural, personnel and production crisis in the industry was mediated by a general managerial crisis that followed the nomenklatura purges of 1937-1938, and indicated a transformation in the system of state priorities that had taken place in a short period, which led to the replacement of the head of the “innovator” with the head of the “functionary”.