Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.If there is one image that captures the culture of fear among musicians in Soviet times, it is Dmitri Shostakovich enthusiastically clapping while Tikhon Khrennikov, general secretary of the Union of Soviet Composers, is publicly condemning him in a speech. Shostakovich, so the story recalled by writer Lyubov Rudneva goes, didn’t even realise he was being insulted.It’s an absurd scene but one that speaks to the kind of extreme political acrobatics required to survive in an era where one false move could be fatal. “Those in favour rarely stayed in favour; it was just a question of when they fell,” writes Julian Barnes in The Noise of Time, his historical novel about the composer’s dance with the authorities. We know about Shostakovich, but there are hundreds of others whose stories, at least in the west, have yet to be told.Many of these lesser known Soviet musicians take centre stage in Michel Krielaars’ highly readable book The Sound of Utopia, in which he reconstructs the lives of 10 composers and performers and how they navigated the repressive Soviet system. Krielaars, an author and literary editor at Dutch newspaper NRC, tells these stories through a mix of first-person reporting, secondary sources and his own personal reflections, having lived in Moscow as a correspondent between 2007-12. Alexander Mosolov’s ‘Iron Foundry’ was criticised for portraying ‘only the noise of the machines’ and not the ‘spirit of the factory’ There are some familiar names here (Prokofiev, Khrennikov and Weinberg), but some of the most compelling portraits are those on the less internationally recognised end of the spectrum, such as the pop singer Klavdiya Shulzhenko and wartime favourite Vadim Kozin. The book also features the pianist Maria Yudina, who you may know from the opening of Armando Iannucci’s satire The Death of Stalin, and whose secret note to the dictator accusing him of betraying the nation triggers his heart attack. The scene is a fiction, but the real Yudina was a “symbol of nonconformism” among Soviet musicians.Krielaars’ portraits of individual composers are well-constructed, self-contained stories but the book as a whole suffers from lacking an overall arc. The author’s first-person intrusions often feel arbitrary and slightly random, as if inserted because they ought to be as opposed to because they are contributing to a wider narrative.He does, however, transport us into the heart of the Soviet machine through a rich mix of anecdotal and historical material. “In the Soviet Union,” writes Krielaars, “musicians were revered as gods.” The fact that Stalin himself was a music-lover didn’t help. He supposedly insisted on listening to every new classical recording, “noting his verdict on the record sleeve: ‘good’, ‘average’, or ‘rubbish’. This last one could, in the worst-case scenario, earn you a bullet.” Musicians, like writers, who Stalin described as “engineers of the human soul”, were believed to have immense social and moral power. If anyone strayed from the general artistic doctrine of “socialist realism”, decreed by Stalin in 1932, they were accused of “formalism”, a charge whose punishment ranged from public denunciation to decades in the gulag. The problem was that what was considered “formalism”, musically at least, seemed rather inconsistent. “If you see which compositions were approved and which were rejected, there’s no connection to the music itself,” says Jascha Nemtsov, a Russian pianist and musicologist interviewed by Krielaars. “Stalin’s terror had absolutely no logic to it, which only augmented the fear, because nobody knew if they would be next.”Even those who did their utmost to satisfy the demands of the authorities weren’t safe. Take Alexander Mosolov whose work “Iron Foundry” (nothing screams socialist realism like that title) was criticised for portraying “only the noise of the machines” and not the “spirit of the factory”. Or Vano Muradeli whose opera The Great Friendship, ostensibly an ode to Stalin’s birthplace Georgia, managed to somehow enrage the dictator. Even “Blue Scarf”, the morale-boosting wartime number popularised by singer Klavdiya Shulzhenko (what Vera Lynn’s “We’ll Meet Again” was for the British), was suddenly outlawed as foolish in 1946.Krielaars diligently describes the haphazardness of this system, but I wanted him to take us closer to the music; how did this turmoil manifest in the notes on the stave? Nonetheless, The Sound of Utopia is an illuminating account of how the Soviet system waged its war on musicians. One line, however, has continued to sound ominously in my ears: “Compared to the three thousand writers arrested under Stalin,” writes Krielaars, “the composers got off lightly.”The Sound of Utopia: Musicians in the Time of Stalin by Michel Krielaars, translated by Jonathan Reeder Pushkin Press £25, 336 pages Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café and follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X
