Soviet Music

Last updates: 2025-07-05: Style and grammar review. 2025-06-29: I got access to the transcription of Lina Prokofiev’s interview to Harvey Sachs, which Morrison uses as part of evidence of Prokofiev’s supposed travel ban. The section on Prokofiev’s Travel Ban was expanded and, since now it’s clear that Morrison’s evidence is very weak, I changed the final conclusions. 2025-06-22: Completed the Analysis of Atovmyan’s memoirs from Ryadom s velikimi. The section on Atovmyan’s memoirs was expanded and reviewed. 2025-06-16: I got access to the book Ryadom s velikimi, edited by Nelly Kravetz, which contains the full correspondence between Prokofiev and L. Atovmyan and Antovmyan’s memoirs. I transcribed all letters between 1932 and 1936 here and, with that, the section on the Atovmyan-Prokofiev correpondence was substancially changed. In early 1936, Sergei Prokofiev, one of the most celebrated composers of the 20th century, decided to leave Paris and settle in Moscow, returning to the USSR (see the timeline). His return has been widely interpreted as a highly symbolic event—one that has fuelled conflicting narratives. A common claim in Western scholarship is that Prokofiev was deceived into returning, only to later find himself trapped by the Soviet regime. One of the most influential works advancing this view is Simon Morrison’s The People’s Artist: Prokofiev’s Soviet Years. But does the historical evidence support this interpretation? ...

In my PhD thesis, I conducted a content analysis of 13 books specializing in the history of Soviet music. For each book, I examined its responses to a set of key historical questions, including: Why were the ASM (Association for Contemporary Music) and RAPM (Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians) dissolved in 1932? Why did Prokofiev return to the USSR in 1936? Why was Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk censored, while Dzerzhinsky’s Quiet Flows the Don was praised? Why was the premiere of Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony canceled? Why was Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony acclaimed? Why did the debate over formalism end when World War II broke out in 1941? Why was Muradeli’s The Great Friendship censored? What were Zhdanov’s objectives in organizing the first Composers’ Congress? Why did Shostakovich agree to travel to New York in 1949 and deliver his speech? Why were the operas Heart and Soul (Zhukovsky) and Bogdan Khmelnitsky (Dankevich) first praised and then later banned1,2? What was the significance of the 1958 document On Rectifying Errors in the Evaluation of the Operas The Great Friendship, Bogdan Khmelnitsky, and From All One’s Heart? My original conclusion: soviet musicology = individualist I found that all these works shared a common assumption: that Soviet music was inherently conservative and lagged behind the historical development of Western European avant-garde music. ...