Scholars of Russian music often decry black-and-white interpretations of life in the USSR. I have done so many times myself. Yet such complaints are becoming increasingly difficult to make. In the notable body of post-Soviet scholarship from the past decade or so researchers have succeeded in almost definitively blurring black and white. With some stubborn exceptions, only shades of grey remain. These two recent books by Pauline Fairclough and Marina Frolova-Walker serve as exemplary studies in grey: both carefully dissect mechanisms of power, control, creativity, and agency within Soviet musical life.

Fairclough, who has built up an impressive bibliography of writings on Dmitri Shostakovich, including a thorough account of his Symphony no. 4, has now turned her attention to Soviet music from the 1920s to the early 1950s.Footnote ¹ (Classics for the Masses covers 1917 until 1953, but concentrates on the 1920s and 1930s.) She aims to oppose the stereotypical ‘monolithic’ view of the Stalin era by emphasizing its ‘many undercurrents of change and flux’ (9). Her book therefore examines ‘how the first socialist regime in world history shaped its own cultural identity in musical terms: what it accepted, rejected and experimented with; and what the consequences of those decisions were’ (8). Specifically, Fairclough traces the reception of classical music – both foreign and domestic – in Russia, a topic of great importance for the light it sheds on larger sociopolitical shifts and the alternative telling of Soviet music history it provides.

As Fairclough looks at the ‘“approved” public culture of the Stalin era’ (8) in Classics for the Masses, she employs several framing concepts, chief among them issues of appropriation and authenticity as well as marketing, by which she means the ways in which older, familiar composers were repackaged and resold to Soviet consumers. She ‘seeks to chart the evolution of the process of . . . the “appropriation” of older Russian and Western culture by the Soviet sphere, and the concurrent “rebranding” or marketing of selected composers to the Soviet public’ (7). She also asks fundamental questions about the purpose of music under the USSR – its role in politically moulding mass audiences (4). And Fairclough continues the tendency of recent Soviet music scholarship by looking at ‘intersections between top-down and bottom-up motivation’, emphasizing the roles played by ‘such unpredictable human agencies as individual taste, career-building, friendships, loyalties and old animosities’ (9–10).

The five chapters of Classics for the Masses are arranged roughly chronologically, beginning with the tumultuous first post-revolutionary decade and moving through successive periods. The backbone of the book is Fairclough's careful study of the repertoire lists for the leading ensembles in Moscow and Leningrad, which add texture to our understanding of who was played when and by whom (e.g., 57–63). These lists are supported by her examination of contemporary criticism and unpublished archival documents, paying attention to which composers drew attention when, in which venues, and for what reasons.

The first chapter sets in motion the institutions, composers, critics, and themes that will be discussed for the remainder of the book. Building on the work of Amy Nelson and Neil Edmunds, Fairclough calls the 1920s ‘overwhelmingly the decade of education, sharing and discovery’ (7).Footnote ² Music was something meant to inform and elevate listeners (50). In the 1920s, Russian composers, including Tchaikovsky, Musorgsky, and Glinka, were recast for Soviet needs, some more easily than others. Meanwhile, the Soviet relationship to Western classics remained thorny. They were considered necessary as a means for the USSR to tout its legitimacy on the world stage, but they were at odds with the new society it was creating.

Significantly, key composers and key compositions were always beyond reproach, among them Mozart's Requiem and Beethoven's Symphony no. 9 (27, 30). Beethoven was easily made Soviet: he encapsulated ‘the ideal blend of popular appeal and detectable ideological content’ (31). Other composers and repertoires had to be massaged to fit the new sociopolitical context. Bach was rebranded in the 1920s as a non-religious ‘humanist’ (29–30; also 123–7 on the 1930s Bach Revival). Orthodox church music was supported (at times) by controversial appeals to its broader ‘cultural value completely independent of its religious context’ (69). But religious music proved difficult to handle and was often subject to bans or other restrictions (72–4). Also noteworthy is the role played by RAPM (Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians) in debates about the proper role of classical music in the new Soviet society. Even as the performance of Western modernism – often by Western instrumentalists or conductors – reached a peak in Leningrad (particularly in the 1926–29 seasons), Fairclough finds no evidence that RAPM ever tried to obstruct the programming (64).

In her second chapter, Fairclough addresses the complicated pivot from the late 1920s to 1932, the time known as the ‘Great Turning Point’ or the ‘Cultural Revolution’, when the influence of RAPM and its conflicts with the other factions (both avant-garde and moderate) reached their peak. Although the programming of Western music did not noticeably change, it became more overtly politicized (81–3). Foreign conductors and contemporary music also continued to appear with surprising frequency at the Leningrad Philharmonia (85). And Russian music had yet to receive special dispensation (87–8). Despite the vigorous debates about suitable repertoire, only sacred music at the Leningrad State Academic Capella (directed by Mikhail Klimov) declined (92), and the Beethoven Society and Bach Society were both purged by Narkompros in 1930.

The next stage, from 1932 to 1941, what Fairclough calls the ‘Stalinist Enlightenment’, is the topic of her third chapter. It, she writes, proves the ‘hardest to interpret retrospectively, because it was a period of extremely intense flux’ (102). Fairclough revises Katerina Clark's study of the ‘Great Appropriation’, the ‘climate of cosmopolitanism’ in the USSR from 1931 to 1937, extending it ‘far earlier’ for music (103).Footnote ³ As Fairclough shows, ‘from at least 1928–36, concert life in Moscow and Leningrad was thoroughly international in scope’ (109; see also the tables on 112–17). Yet, predictably, the Pravda attack on Shostakovich and the subsequent attack on musical formalism in early 1936 led to an immediate shift in programming away from contemporary (post-1910) European music (113–14; 118). Both the rise of Socialist Realism after 1934 and the increasing influence of the Soviet idea of kul'turnost’ (being cultured) played key roles in new repertoire choices (2–3). Soviet critics needed positive examples – unassailable works – ‘in order to castigate peers’ (120, 137). Therefore, by the middle of the decade, Western classics had become ascendant (‘Bach, Handel, Mozart, and Beethoven were the icons’), and over the late 1930s nineteenth-century Russian composers rose to prominence (6, 120).

As Fairclough shows in Chapters 4 and 5, from the Second World War to 1948 and up to the death of Stalin ‘Great Russian Nationalism’ dominated. During this period, and particularly during the early Cold War years, ‘only the most familiar and accepted parts of Western classical repertoire could be retained’ (8, 221). One of the most notable reappraisals concerned Rachmaninoff. There had been isolated attempts to ban his music during the late 1920s and 1930s, but after 1917 ‘there was no sustained period of time when his music was seriously neglected’ (185, 6–7). Nonetheless, his death in 1943 spurred on a ‘full-scale embrace’ of his music in the USSR (187; much the same would happen after Stravinsky's death in 1971). Fairclough also reveals the short-lived effects of the 1948 Resolution on Music: after a very ‘brief ban in 1949’, works by Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Myaskovsky, and Khachaturyan were soon allowed back into the repertoire (227).

I only have space to describe the trends Fairclough examines in the broadest strokes. Many of the smaller yet crucial dodges and feints in both repertoire and policy that she presents in more granular detail will be interesting largely to specialists. But the often idiosyncratic critical discourse surrounding these shifts, the detailed information she provides about Soviet repertoire choices, and her larger framework deserve attention from scholars beyond Soviet music studies. Classics for the Masses forms a companion to recent musicological writings on cultural transfer by Gundula Kreuzer and Erik Levi, as well as to studies of changing European repertoires by such scholars as William Weber.Footnote ⁴ It also ties into recent studies of the construction, branding, and selling of music.Footnote ⁵ Fairclough notes too the resemblance of her project to Marina Raku's recent book on Western classical music in the Soviet Union; although there is indeed some overlap, I think Fairclough is correct about their ultimately complementary character (10–11).Footnote ⁶

Earlier I mentioned the still-persisting black-and-white exceptions in Soviet musical scholarship. Frolova-Walker's Stalin's Music Prize takes aim at some of the most tenacious of these exceptions, particularly the myths concerning Dmitri Shostakovich. She covers the eleven occasions on which groups of Stalin Prizes – munificent, prestigious awards granted to creators, performers, and thinkers in a variety of arts and sciences fields – were awarded between 1941 and 1952. She defines three goals for her ‘microhistory’: revealing ‘how things were done in the musical sphere, and more broadly, in the surrounding culture’ of the USSR; piercing the veil surrounding Soviet music making and showing the participants as real people with very real desires and very real foibles; and illuminating ‘how musical Socialist Realism was institutionally practiced’ (5–6). She more than achieves all these goals. Stalin's Music Prize is a stunning performance, revealing absolute control of the material. The book holds attention because of its dual focus on personalities and institutions, and all the vicissitudes, grudges, favouritism, and, yes, thoughtfulness, it reveals behind the awards.

As Frolova-Walker intends, the structure of the book enables dipping into chapters out of order. Some crossover from chapter to chapter occurs; for example, a quotation concerning Kabalevsky appears twice (on 232 and 154). But the connections are always clear, the organization sensible. Frolova-Walker begins by discussing, ‘How It All Worked?’ (the title of Chapter 1) and ‘The First Year’ (Chapter 2). The meticulous presentation of the theory and practice behind the award at its outset prepares the way for several chapters dealing with leading Soviet musical figures: Prokofiev (Chapter 3), Shostakovich as both composer (Chapter 4) and committee member (Chapter 5), and Myaskovsky and his pupils Khachaturian, Kabalevsky, and Shebalin (all Chapter 6). Chapter 7 addresses the relationship between centre and periphery – Russia (and Moscow) and the other republics (Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, etc.). Chapters 8 and 9 discuss Stalin Prize deliberations about, respectively, the role of popular music and performers. The final two chapters are arguably the most gripping: they take into account the complications facing the awards process following the 1948 Resolution on Music and Stalin's death.

The narrative of the rise and fall of the Stalin Prizes and the Stalin Prize Committee (KSP, Komitet Stalinskoi Premii) reads, unsurprisingly, as tragedy. The unexpectedly well-paid committee members began with high hopes, convinced they were evaluating only aesthetics and not ideology, but they quickly came to realize how naïve those hopes had been (17). As theatre director Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko remarked during the 1942 deliberations: ‘If we give a prize to [the mass songs of] Aleksandrov, but not to Prokofiev for his Quartet, then it is not actually the music that we are judging’ (71). This is a central point, hammered home by the many debates over whether to give the prize to the artist, and hence to an entire body of work, or to a representative composition, and how to evaluate these representative examples – did they match the evolving criteria of Socialist Realism according to the members of the panel and/or their overseers? Often representative works were added to or removed from the prize list to fit external criteria: ‘For the purposes of creating a more balanced list, whether for more young composers, more national composers, more demotic works and so on’ (62). Given the structure of the hierarchy responsible for the prizes (laid out by Frolova-Walker on 20), it becomes clear how powerless the committee often could be, falling as it did at the very bottom of the bureaucracy under (or competing with) Agitprop and the various ministries, including the Ministry of Culture, and ultimately subservient to the Politburo, and, finally, Stalin.

And yet the KSP still held influence. The situation varied from year to year, composer to composer, and work to work. As Frolova-Walker writes of Prokofiev's Stalin Prize experience: ‘His wins and misses are entangled in an intricate web of personal relations and unpredictable circumstances’ (63). Frolova-Walker's examples, along with other scholarship on prizes, should assuage the wounded ego of anyone passed over for a prize, and should make those who have been awarded think twice before their chests swell with pride.Footnote ⁷

The payoffs for winners, both literal and figurative, were huge. The sum for first-class winners was 100,000 roubles, ‘an astonishing sum of money’ for ordinary citizens in the USSR (12). (There were ultimately three classes of prize; each received correspondingly diminishing sums.) But it held value beyond the monetary. Prokofiev almost immediately ordered new stationery featuring the word ‘Laureate’ after his first win in 1943 (75). And laureates received better rations during the Second World War as well (71). But by the end of the 1940s and beginning of the 1950s the prizes were viewed with suspicion. There were simply too many of them (262–3).

The archival documents Frolova-Walker presents allow us new, sometimes unexpected impressions of the personalities involved. We catch glimpses of Stalin as a well-prepared reader who rarely intervened in the awards process (194) and of Andrei Zhdanov as a sensitive musical listener (116–17). We also get more than a glimpse of Shostakovich as a problematic person.

The Shostakovich who emerges over the course of Stalin's Music Prize is powerful and opinionated, a willing and eager – sometimes too eager – participant. ‘Shostakovich speaks his mind’, said the pianist Alexander Goldenweiser (113). He was ‘an experienced and sophisticated player’ (82), ‘difficult, if authoritative’, and ‘undiplomatic’ (118). And, at least in 1947, he ‘enjoyed a very amicable and lucrative relationship with the state’ (117). In the KSP meetings, Frolova-Walker summarizes, he ‘behaved as a self-appointed quality inspector, exposing what he saw as sloppy or shoddy practices’, yet ‘he lacked the diplomacy and networking skill to have any effect beyond making a splash in meetings’ (121). Shostakovich served on the committee in 1947, was removed after the 1948 Resolution on Music, and was reinstated in 1951, serving from then until the end of the Stalin Prizes in 1954. After 1951, he displayed many of the same characteristics recited above, but now on behalf of his students and friends Moisei Weinberg, Yuri Levitin, and Georgi (Yuri) Sviridov. As Frolova-Walker concludes, ‘Shostakovich clearly had a strong desire to participate in public life, and following this compulsion sometimes allowed him to make a principled stand, or to help out friends, and at other times drew him into shabby compromises, or indeed into joining the Communist Party’ (134). Shostakovich was prestigious and controversial, and when his own work was being considered for a Stalin Prize, it ‘heightened the tension far more than any other composer’ (112).

Frolova-Walker pulls no punches, especially in her final chapters, about myths or controversial topics. On Khrennikov's responsibility for carrying on the legacy of the 1948 campaign until 1958, she declares: ‘Since it is usually acknowledged that he brought it to a resolute end, then it should equally be true that he was responsible for how long it lasted’ (257). Of pianist Maria Yudina's reputed awarding of the Stalin Prize by Stalin himself, she states, ‘Not only is the story backed by no evidence, but it lacks the slightest shred of plausibility’ (221; also 8–9). And she names and shames those responsible for denigrating Shostakovich's Symphony no. 10, including Khrennikov (275–6), in discussions of the work held in 1954 for Stalin Prizes that were never awarded. Throughout, Frolova-Walker's writing is clear, witty, and accessible. She has a knack for well-turned phrases and often provides pithy, insightful descriptions of musical compositions, as in her summary of Shostakovich's ‘unwieldy and unmemorable, yet terrifying and sublime Eighth Symphony’ (111).

Most important is Frolova-Walker's finding that decisions for the Stalin Prizes were never entirely arbitrary. It ‘was largely a consistent and rule-governed practice sustained over eleven annual cycles, and working through thousands of submitted works and productions from music and the other arts’ (284). Frolova-Walker argues that this ‘large statistical sample’ allows us to discern ‘aesthetic doctrines’ and ‘large-scale trends’ within Socialist Realism. Thus, in one of her most crucial formulations she writes, ‘while scholars often describe Socialist Realism as an arbitrary power game and essentially an empty concept, the practice of the Stalin Prize awards allows us to see Socialist Realism within a coherent narrative framework, evolving slowly, never changing beyond recognition, with demarcations between core works, acceptable but marginal works and the unacceptable’ (292). This core concentrated on works ‘national in form, socialist in content’: often cantatas, concertos, or pieces for folk-orchestra. Over three decades ago Katerina Clark defined literary Socialist Realism by its ‘patristic texts’ – its ‘official classics’.Footnote ⁸ There has never been a musical equivalent to Clark's text, likely due to the difficulty – the tediousness – of going through untexted musical works trying to discern basic plots or other commonalities with the same degree of specificity. Frolova-Walker's book makes a clever end-run around such an approach, and in so doing gives us a more refined version of actually existing musical Socialist Realism. It might be the closest musicology gets to Clark's study.

At the American Musicological Society annual meeting in Vancouver in 2016, the Cold War and Music Study Group considered ‘Lost Repertories of the Cold War’.Footnote ⁹ Beyond the lost repertoire presented by the Stalin Prizes in the aggregate focused on national cultures and particular genres, Frolova-Walker points to another lost repertoire central to Soviet musical life and masked by the common fixation on Shostakovich and Prokofiev, a repertoire centred on Myaskovsky, whom she calls the ‘key figure in the Soviet musical landscape’ (158). Myaskovsky won more first-class Stalin Prizes than Shostakovich or Prokofiev, more than anyone, in fact: four. (Shostakovich only won three first-class prizes; Prokofiev won four, but only because of an ‘administrative oversight’.)

The intersections between Fairclough's and Frolova-Walker's books are numerous: the reception in the USSR of nineteenth-century Russian music (especially Mussorgsky); the tensions between ‘Russifying’ and giving other national colourings to Soviet musical culture (Fairclough, 182; Frolova-Walker, Chapter 7); the fallout from the 1948 Resolution; the surprising ubiquity of Goldenweiser (Fairclough: 204–7; Frolova-Walker: passim); and the importance both Stalin Prize adjudicators and Soviet concert programmers and policy makers accorded what Frolova-Walker calls ‘that much sought-after “music for the people”’ (275). Fairclough and Frolova-Walker also similarly engage with larger questions of canonicity, prestige, and taste. I am grateful for all the historians writing intelligently about musical matters today, but I am especially proud as a musicologist to see musicologists tackling these central topics. Thoughtful and thorough, both books deserve a wide audience. It will take time for their implications to filter into scholarship, teaching, and performing, but filter they necessarily will.