Shostakovich and Stalin: Symphony as propaganda By Lev Navrozov

John Franse, a generous reader and friend of mine (and a lover of classical music), asked me in his e-mail to write a column about the “Soviet composer” Dmitri Shostakovich.

On the shelves of my library is a 917-page volume, published in 2000 in Russia in Russian and entitled “Shostakovich Between a Moment and Eternity.” I cannot discuss its 917-page pages in my 3-page column, but one point may be of interest. Just as those who have never been hungry cannot imagine how it feels to be starving or dying of hunger, so the Russian and Western contributors to this volume cannot imagine how it felt living in Stalin’s Russia. In contrast to Rachmaninoff, who was 44 when Lenin and his associates came to the absolute autocratic possession of the country in 1917 and who managed to emigrate in 1918, Shostakovich was 11, and had to stay in the new owners’ Russia.

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