Chained Melody
TLS
Music and Soviet power under Stalin
By Simon Morrison
Soviet culture was militarized under Joseph Stalin, and cultural officials behaved, at times, like members of the secret police. In The Sound of Utopia: Musicians in the time of Stalin, Michel Krielaars relates how second-tier composers rose through the ranks of the Union of Soviet Composers to hector their artistic betters, including Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich. Among the targets were less well-known talents whose music (what survives of it, at least) has been unearthed by scholars for performance inside and (most often) outside Russia. Nothing about Stalinism makes for pleasant reading, and, although music tried to illuminate the darkness of this period, it could not.
Krielaars, a Dutch journalist with years of experience in Russia and an understanding of the workings of the Stalinist regime, uses music as a lens to explore cultural oppression, power and their arbitrary workings in the Soviet Union from 1936 to 1953. Over ten chapters, he details the cultural effects of the purges of the 1930s, the Second World War and the second wave of purges in the late 1940s, while reminiscing about his own visits to museums and conversations with musicians’ relatives. Much of what he describes is dystopian rather than utopian, though in the Soviet context the two terms aren’t as opposite as they might seem.
Photo credit: Dmitri Shostakovich before the Congress of the Union of Soviet Composers, Kremlin Palace|© Album/Alamy Stock Photo
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