Music of the Soviet Union


The music of the Soviet Union varied in many genres and epochs. The majority of it was considered to be part of the Russian culture, but other national cultures from the Republics of the Soviet Union made significant contributions as well. The Soviet state supported musical institutions, but also carried out content censorship. According to Vladimir Lenin, "Every artist, everyone who considers himself an artist, has the right to create freely according to his ideal, independently of everything. However, we are communists and we must not stand with folded hands and let chaos develop as it pleases. We must systemically guide this process and form its result."

Classical music of the Soviet Union

Classical music of the Soviet Union developed from the music of the Russian Empire. It gradually evolved from the experiments of the revolutionary era, such as orchestras with no conductors, towards classicism favored under Joseph Stalin's office.
The music patriarchs of the era were Sergei Prokofiev, Dmitri Shostakovich and Aram Khachaturian. With time, a wave of younger Soviet composers, including Georgy Sviridov, Tikhon Khrennikov, and Alfred Schnittke managed to break through.
Many musicians from the Soviet era have established themselves as world's leading artists: violinists David Oistrakh, Leonid Kogan, Gidon Kremer, Viktor Tretiakov and Oleg Kagan; cellists Mstislav Rostropovich, Daniil Shafran, and Natalia Gutman; violist Yuri Bashmet; pianists Sviatoslav Richter, Emil Gilels and many other musicians.

Music in Stalin's early years

After Joseph Stalin had succeeded in expelling Leon Trotsky from the Central Committee in 1927, he very soon cut off connections with the West and established an isolationist state. Stalin rejected Western culture and its ‘bourgeois principles,’ as these did not agree with the policies of the Soviet Communist Party or the working class. The Association of Contemporary Musicians, a faction of more progressive Soviet musicians, who had thrived from exposure to the West during the NEP years, quickly dissolved without the support of the worker's state. Former members of the ACM joined the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians. The RAPM, composed of ‘reactionary proletarians,’ opposed Western music ideals, instead seeking to encourage traditional Russian music. Conflict between reactionaries and progressives within the RAPM ensued. Although the Communist Party supported the reactionaries, it did not directly act to resolve the conflict; the party's attention during this period was instead focused on the Soviet Union's economic development. In 1932, the RAPM was disbanded in favor of a new organization: the Union of Soviet Composers.

Stalin's Second Revolution of 1932

The year 1932 marked a new cultural movement of Soviet nationalism. The party pursued its agenda through the newly founded Union of Soviet Composers, a division of the Ministry of Culture. Musicians who hoped to gain the financial support of the Communist Party were obligated to join the USC. Composers were expected to present new works to the organization to be approved before publication. The USC stated that this process aimed to guide young musicians to successful careers. Thus, through the USC, the Communist Party was able to control the direction of new music.
Stalin applied the notion of socialist realism to classical music. Maxim Gorky first introduced socialist realism in a literary context in the early 20th century. Socialist realism demanded that all mediums of art convey the struggles and triumphs of the proletariat. It was an inherently Soviet movement: a reflection of Soviet life and society. Composers were expected to abandon Western progressivism in favor of simple, traditional Russian and Soviet melodies. In 1934, Prokofiev wrote in his diary about the compositional necessity for a "new simplicity," a new lyricism that he believed would be a source of national pride for the Soviet people. Peter and the Wolf is a good illustration of the kind of consonance that existed between Prokofiev's artistic vision and Soviet ideals. Additionally, music served as a powerful propaganda agent, as it glorified the proletariat and the Soviet regime. Stalin's greatness became a theme of countless Soviet songs, a trend that he attempted to stop on more than one occasion. Communist ideals and promotion of the party were thus the foundations of this cultural movement.
Ivan Dzerzhinsky's opera, Tikhii Don, composed in 1935 became the model for socialist realism in music. Upon seeing the opera, Stalin himself praised the work, as it featured themes of patriotism while using simple, revolutionary melodies. Composers were writing for a proletarian audience; Dzerzhinsky's Tikhii Don met this expectation. On the other hand, Shostakovich's opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, first performed in 1934, resulted in disaster for the prodigious composer. Although Shostakovich's work was initially critically well received, Stalin and the Communist Party found the opera's themes of a "pre-socialist, petty-bourgeois, Russian mentality" entirely inappropriate. Pravda, a state-sponsored newspaper, harshly criticized Shostakovich's opera. Thus, these two operas provided composers with an indication of the direction the Communist Party planned to lead Soviet music. Soviet music should have been music the common workingman could understand and take pride in. This marked a stark change in party policy from the unrestricted freedoms of the early Soviet years.

Classical music during the Second World War

The Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 stunned the unready Soviet forces. Stalin's administration was forced to react quickly and devote all its resources into the war effort. As a result, Soviet music witnessed a relaxation of restrictions on expression. This period was a break from the policies of the 1930s. The Communist Party, seeing as it was allied with several Western powers, focused on patriotic propaganda rather than anti-Western rhetoric. With a restored connection to the west, Soviet music experienced a revival, with more modernist and innovative themes.
Composers responded to their new freedoms with music laden with themes of patriotism and military triumph. Wartime music featured a reemergence of grand symphonic works compared to the simplistic ‘song operas’ of the 1930s. Sergei Prokofiev, Nikolai Myaskovsky, Aram Khachaturian and Shostakovich each composed war symphonies. Chamber music, a genre that had fallen out of favor in the previous decade, was also revitalized. Wartime music aimed to boost Soviet morale both at home and on the battlefront, and it was successful, especially as the Soviet army began to gain momentum against the Nazis in 1942.

Zhdanovism and a return to the policies of the 1930s

Following the end of the war, the Communist Party refocused on isolationism and culture control. Stalin appointed Andrei Zhdanov in 1946 to carry out this return to the policies of the 1930s. Zhdanovism meant a reemphasis on socialist realism, as well as anti-Western sentiment. The Communist party again encouraged composers to incorporate themes of the Russian Revolution, as well as nationalist tunes. Zhdanov castigated composers on an individual basis, particularly Prokofiev and Shostakovich, for embracing Western ideals during the war. Tikhon Khrennikov, meanwhile, was appointed head of the Union of Soviet Composers. Khrennikov would become one of the most despised figures among Soviet musicians, as the USC embraced a greater role in censorship.
Reaction to the Communist Party's restrictions varied with the different generations of composers. The younger generation largely strove to conform, although the music they produced was simplistic and bare in structure. Desperate to find acceptable melodies, composers incorporated folk tunes into their music. Some composers, Prokofiev and Shostakovich included, turned to film music. Shostakovich, among others, withheld his more expressive and perhaps controversial works until after Stalin's death. Shostakovich was honored by Stalin and the Soviets for his brilliant music, despite Stalin not liking the direction some of his music took. The complex tonal structures and progressive themes that were prevalent during the war slowly disappeared. The years after the war and prior to the cultural Thaw under Nikita Khrushchev thus marked a rapid decline in Soviet music.

The Khrushchev Thaw

Nikita Khrushchev's 1953 rise to power inaugurated a period of moderate liberalization in Soviet culture often dubbed the "Khruschev Thaw". This period marked an end to the anti-formalist persecutions of the late 1940s and early 50s. Composers who had fallen out of favor during the final Stalin years returned to the public eye, and pieces which had previously been deemed unsuitable for public presentation for their unorthodoxy were once again performed. Many of Dmitri Shostakovich's early banned works, including his first opera and his symphonies, were rehabilitated over the course of Khrushchev's premiership. Western musicians like Leonard Bernstein and Glenn Gould also toured the Soviet Union for the first time in the late 1950s.
The Khrushchev administration also solidified the position of the Union of Soviet Composers as the dominant administrative authority over the state sponsorship of classical music, a process which began during the later Stalin years. Tikhon Khrennikov, a composer by trade, led the USC from 1948 to 1991 as one of the only Stalin-era political appointees to remain in power until the Soviet Union's 1991 collapse. Khrennikov's USC actively attempted to undo the policies of Zhdanovischina, the campaign of ideological purity waged by Stalin's second in command Andrei Zhdanov from 1946 to 1948. In 1958, Khrennikov persuaded Khrushchev to officially rehabilitate many of the artists indicted in Zhdanov's 1948 "Resolution on Music of the Central Committee of the Communist Party", a document censuring composers whose music failed to sufficiently realize the socialist realist aesthetic.