This article is taken from the February 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
A farcical episode unfolds: a pianist in a Moscow concert hall plays a Mozart concerto, which is broadcast live on the radio. Stalin’s secretary calls to demand a recording but none has been made. Panic breaks out: the pianist refuses to play again, the producer tries to bribe her, the conductor drops dead of a heart attack and a replacement — the only one left in the city who hasn’t been arrested or killed — is driven to the concert hall in his nightclothes.
The anecdote, of course, is satire, a scene from Armando Iannucci’s film The Death of Stalin, yet as this engrossing new book shows, fiction is sometimes not so very far removed from fact.
The Dutch journalist Michel Krielaars gives a vivid account of life in Stalin’s Soviet Union: the climate of fear, the need to be on your guard and to “play the game”. Musicians lived in constant terror of putting a foot, or a note, wrong. Some were hauled off to undertake hard labour in the gulags, others were banned from Moscow, Leningrad or Kyiv — effectively ending their careers.
Cancellation was the order of the day: scores were withdrawn, gramophone records destroyed, entries removed from encyclopaedias. Spies were everywhere, and, with denunciations of neighbours and colleagues encouraged, you could trust no-one.
As Krielaars shows, musicians could find themselves targeted for almost anything: having the wrong politics, being Jewish, homosexual, too outspoken and, above all, for writing or performing the “wrong” type of music. (The composer Vsevolod Zaderatsky was sent to a gulag for six years merely for putting up posters advertising concerts of music by Wagner and Strauss.)
Repertoires were strictly policed. Modernist innovation was outlawed in favour of bombastic, simplistic tunes “for the masses”. But because official Communist Party diktat could change on a whim, popular songs and dances were not necessarily any safer than so-called “formalism”.
Composer Alexander Mosolov wrote music about clanking machinery and the joys of the proletariat that seemed in line with the new ideology and still found himself smeared as an enemy of the people and subjected to severe punishment.
As a result, many musicians cultivated an ambiguous relationship with the Kremlin, not least Dmitri Shostakovich — but since his biography is already well-known, he features here only as a cameo role in other people’s stories.
Sviatoslav Richter, Mstislav Rostropovich and Sergei Prokofiev each receive a chapter, but Krielaars’ most striking achievement is to introduce us to an array of forgotten composers, conductors, instrumentalists, singers, music bureaucrats and musicologists, some of whom were deliberately “erased” by the state.
Particularly interesting are the Russian forces’ sweetheart Klavdiya Shulzhenko, constantly adapting her style to suit the latest diktat, the unfortunate Jewish composer Moisei Weinberg, who fled Nazi-occupied Poland only to fall foul of communism and the popular tenor Vadim Kozin, who sang for Stalin one day and was arrested the next, ultimately giving up on life and never returning from the desolate city of Magadan in the east, to which he had been exiled.
One of the most compelling aspects of the book is how Krielaars interweaves the past with the present, often exposing the “seams” of his historical method by describing encounters with Russians who nervously recalled meeting his protagonists or hearing accounts from relatives.
Some of the episodes described seem so nightmarish — a man disappearing without trace simply for expressing a liking for symphonies and oratorios — that one would hope they could be consigned safely to the distant past.
But could such things happen again? Krielaars closes the book with a haunting epilogue about the cultural consequences of the current Russian war on Ukraine: artists fleeing, opportunistic orchestral members in “Z”-logo t-shirts, canonical composers banned as well as the policing of speech, cancel culture, the collective frowning on certain musical repertoires for not meeting the prevailing political agenda, music education being downgraded, the takeover of cultural institutions by ideologues with little specialist expertise.
Even here, in the safety of the West, some of the phenomena described by Krielaars seem more resonant than they might have done a decade ago. His book is a prescient warning about where such things can lead and compulsory reading for anyone who thinks that threats to the arts only come from the political right.
