The Sound of Utopia: Musicians in the Time of Stalin
Michel Krielaars, Pushkin Press, £25

In 1948, Dmitri Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev, Aram Khachaturian and other prominent Soviet composers were attacked by Andrei Zhdanov, Joseph Stalin’s culture secretary. He accused them of “bourgeois formalism,” and demanded in its place “socialist realism” – an optimistic, conservative, accessible music for the people. The row was the culmination of years of friction between the regime and its composers – most famously, Shostakovich.

This is the backdrop to Michel Krielaars’s fascinating new book, The Sound of Utopia, which describes the fate of various classical and popular musicians during Stalin’s reign. They include the composers Sergei Prokofiev, Alexander Mossolov, Mieczyslaw Weinberg and Tikhon Khrennikov, the pianists Sviastoslav Richter and Maria Yudina, the popular singers Klavdiya Shulzhenko and Vadim Kozim, and the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich.

All of them fell foul of the authorities for one reason or another: Kozim because of his homosexuality, Weinberg because of his Jewishness, Yudina because of her outspoken religiosity, Khrennikov because of his dubious position as general secretary of the Composers’ Union, Rostropovich owing to his courageous defence of others.