Intuitively, it feels as though dividing up a period of history into chunks of time divided by policies cannot be a useful way of measuring something as fluid as cultural change. Yet in the Soviet Union, a coherent arts policy took a very long time to emerge, largely because of opposing interests within arts communities and a relative absence of top-down control. That lack of state guidance meant that, at the very beginning of the Soviet period – the years of revolution, civil war and finally the rise of Stalin to total power – artistic life was marked by conflicts between factions. These are the years Frolova-Walker and Walker have chosen to focus on in this invaluable study, which begins with the revolution and concludes with the 1932 Resolution that ended the ‘long 1920s’ with the establishment of professional unions and the demise of the proletarian groups. A slow-burning theme within their book is the idea that, by the time Socialist Realism was imposed on the arts community in 1934, composers were already beginning to embrace the more conservative style demanded by the regime, at least in part because of the pressures exerted on the ‘modernist’ side by the militant proletarian groups at the end of the 1920s.

During the first decade of the Soviet era, the Russian ‘Silver Age’ was drawing to a close just as a new, tougher age was beginning, and this conjunction of world-views proved extraordinarily fruitful. Two of the most important Silver Age poets, Alexander Blok and Andrei Bely, ushered in the new revolutionary age alongside the young radical Vladimir Mayakovsky. Anton Chekhov's plays were still produced at the Stanislavsky Theatre (still starring his wife, Olga Knipper-Chekhova) while Vsevolod Meyerhold experimented with ways of acting and staging that were the complete antithesis of everything Stanislavsky had taught him. A dazzling display of new ‘isms’ in the visual arts – constructivism, rayonism, suprematism, primitivism, futurism – put Russian avant-garde art at the forefront of European trends.

Yet the music of this era is not often heard. Apart from the scores of a few young composers of Shostakovich's generation, who had encountered new music from Europe and were setting out on their careers in the later part of the decade, the first major Soviet-era works were penned by composers such as Rheinhold Glière, Nikolai Medtner (emigrated 1921), Alexander Glazunov (emigrated 1928), Alexander Grechaninov (emigrated 1925) and Nikolai Myaskovsky. These are all household names, but not especially popular ones; with Stravinsky and Prokofiev out of the picture, the next great talent to emerge from Russia was Shostakovich, flanked by a handful of talented modernists such as Gavriil Popov and Alexander Mosolov. It is a quirk of Soviet cultural history that while visual arts, theatre and poetry were at a peak of innovation, music was stuck in the post-Skryabin doldrums. And it is surely one of that history's biggest paradoxes that it took the more repressive age of High Stalinism to return Russian music to the heights of the previous century – though one might just as easily argue that it was solely down to Shostakovich and Prokofiev, both of whom could have managed quite happily without Stalinism. If, as Frolova-Walker and Walker suggest, Stravinsky had still been living in Russia in 1917 and stayed there, things would have been very different indeed: the startling trajectory that began when he took over Liadov's commission for Diaghilev's Firebird could have remained a Russian phenomenon, with Stravinsky becoming the vital connection between Rimsky-Korsakov and the new Soviet age. But that was not to be. This is all part of the reason why revolutionary musical life got off to a rather slow and sedate start – and also why musicological interest in the pre-Shostakovich generation has been so lukewarm.

However, the recent turn in Russian music studies from analysis of scores to the documentation and interpretation of history has changed the whole framework in which we view this period. We may not be wildly enthused by the music composed in the early revolutionary years, but the combination of idealism, social engineering, radicalization, and struggle for political influence is an enticing one for any cultural historian. Music and Soviet Power is the long-awaited fruit of many years' painstaking archival work, perusal of the crumbling yellow pages of old music journals now almost a century old, and careful translation work into vivid, idiomatic English. As a source book it is invaluable; the vast majority of the readings are inaccessible outside Russian libraries, and none have been translated in any earlier studies. With archival access, and a wealth of superb Russian-language secondary sources published since perestroyka, Frolova-Walker and Walker have been able to provide perhaps the most crucial information of all: the private back-stories making up the historical paraphernalia that, once revealed, forever changes the way history is viewed.

To uncover historical events in this depth of detail is a major undertaking, requiring major archival investigation. To this end, old letters stored in the personal files of the critic-composer Boris Asafiev, Nikolai Myaskovsky and their circle prove highly revealing. Long before they came under attack from the militant proletarian faction, Asafiev and his friend Vladimir Derzhanovsky joined forces to try to re-mould Myaskovsky into a composer of Soviet cantatas and even operas (a genre he avoided completely). When at last they were utterly routed by the proletarians, Asafiev clearly blamed his colleagues for failing to take his advice; in ignoring him, he claimed, they left a vacuum that the proletarians rushed to fill and so failed to set Soviet music on a secure path. He may have been correct, but it is more likely that the tenacity of the proletarian wing came less from aesthetic or ideological objections and more – as Frolova-Walker and Walker argue convincingly – from the desire to seize power and influence. Asafiev, a sincere proselytizer for new Soviet music, probably failed to recognize the cynicism of his enemies and felt his cause had been abandoned.

When the proletarians felt the tide turning against them, we are able to discern, in Alexander Davidenko's exhortation to his colleagues, a powerful and unpleasantly aggressive personality. Certainly, the proletarian faction was prepared to use public and private denunciation of their rivals to seize as much power and influence as they could; yet in the end, two of their besieged enemies (Mikhail Gnesin and Alexander Mosolov) wrote directly to Stalin informing him of the parlous state of musical affairs. Though Frolova-Walker and Walker caution the reader against believing that these appeals prompted direct action (the wheels were already set in motion for the events that swiftly followed, and these letters simply harnessed music to an already powerful literary cause), the response was swift and dramatic – with the Resolution of 1932, the proletarian organizations were crushed.

Asafiev was not the only critic waiting for a kind of Soviet Beethoven to come along and lead the way. Leonid Sabaneyev – the critic who famously panned the premiere of Prokofiev's Scythian Suite without attending the concert (he was caught out because the performance was cancelled) – wrote movingly in 1922 of how his old idol, Skryabin, ‘once seemed to be so much more than he proved to be in reality’ and that, having now been through the traumas of revolution and civil war, Russia had not yet produced a composer who was able to rise to the ‘monumental art’ demanded by the new age. That figure was, of course, to be Shostakovich – still a teenage boy when Sabaneyev wrote his essay. Yet there were figures in the revolutionary avant-garde camp who saw matters differently. One really striking document is Artur Lourie's ‘Declaration of the Music Section’, which sets out a utopian Silver Age vision of music as possessing fantastical powers of social transformation: ‘the paths of living folk song lead to cognition of the movement of the stars and the rhythm of the universe’ (29). Such inflated ambitions – themselves decidedly Skryabinesque in origin – bring to mind Boris Groys's words on the ‘myth of the innocent avant-garde’ as compared with the socialist realism that swept the modernists aside: in reality, as he points out, the avant-garde and socialist realist platforms were equally concerned with social engineering and in this sense, Groys argues that socialist realism can be seen as the natural successor to the early Soviet avant-garde.Footnote ¹

Frolova-Walker and Walker may see matters slightly differently. For them, the Stürm und Drang created by the proletarian movements acted as a kind of ‘goat in the room’, according to an old Russian and East European fable. A family struggling in an overcrowded house seek help and are told to add a goat to their household. After a short time, when permitted to remove the goat, the family are so relieved that they forget their former misery. Thus it was for Soviet composers, hard pressed by Davidenko and his ilk. When the Resolution came, their enemies were at last stripped of their power. And in the euphoria that followed, it is easy to overlook the fact that the avant-garde – what there was of it in music – had been permanently silenced. Mosolov's path of decline in the 1930s was swift and painful, and included a period in the camps. Nikolai Roslavets, the creator of a Soviet twelve-tone system of composition, was forced to move to Uzbekistan and abandon his former modernism entirely. Even the young Lev Knipper, whose earlier works show a marked adherence to Weimar modernism, swung sharply in the direction of populism to such an extent that his fellow composers were unable to take him seriously. Music and Soviet Power does not cover these sad events – the narrative ends in 1932 – but some of the letters that passed between Asafiev and Myaskovsky revealed here suggest that Myaskovsky eventually began to adapt his style to assuage the proletarian colleagues snapping at his heels. His Twelfth Symphony made major concessions to the popular accessibility they demanded, and though in this sense it was certainly a ‘proletarian’ work, it also fitted conveniently into the socialist realist style that was to follow, and was indeed swiftly adopted as such.

Frolova-Walker and Walker are surely correct in their conclusion that, by 1932, Soviet composers were already moving towards the style that became known as socialist realism, though how and why they were doing so is still a contentious matter. Their reminder that even Shostakovich, whose career positively flourished under Stalin, was affected by sustained attack from proletarian critics is a timely one: the premieres of his first opera The Nose and his radical Third Symphony marked the start of what the authors argue was a ‘RAPM-induced hiatus’ [RAPM=Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians] (268). However, the path from The Nose to Lady Macbeth – even the path from the Third to the Fourth Symphony – was a gradual one, and I doubt whether any Shostakovich scholar would seriously suggest that the works he composed after 1930 are evidence of coercion and compromise. Rather, the composer's own letters and statements from this period show that his ideas were evolving – entirely in tandem with those of many Soviet contemporaries – away from the urge to shock, towards the urge to communicate with a wide audience. Shostakovich's friend, the conductor Nikolai Malko, who toured widely abroad, reported back that, in the wake of the Wall Street Crash, musical culture in the West had retrenched into ‘reactionary’ styles (269). Was the ‘RAPM-induced hiatus’ in Soviet modernism around 1930 an entirely coincidental parallel to a retreat from elite musical modernism in the West? We might be tempted to say so; keeping up with the West was hardly a preoccupation of RAPM's membership, who firmly believed (as did many in the opposing modernist camp) that Western culture was in decline. Yet the fact that this retreat from avant-gardism was a European (and American) phenomenon of the 1930s muddies the waters for Soviet music historians. From a Soviet-only perspective, RAPM's influence seems decisive in silencing the modernists and shaping music of the 1930s, despite their loss of power. But from a pan-Western perspective, Soviet Russia kept pace perfectly with the overall trends of both the 1920s and the 1930s; and of course, political repression of the avant-garde in the 1930s was hardly a phenomenon restricted to the Soviet Union. There is still ample room for debate on this question; but in helping Western scholars to better comprehend the 1920s as they unfolded in post-revolutionary Russia, Frolova-Walker and Walker have produced an absolutely indispensable book.

The latest edited volume on Shostakovich, Alexander Ivashkin and Andrew Kirkman's Contemplating Shostakovich, is a fine contribution to the burgeoning English-language Shostakovich literature. As the editors note in their Preface, there is a heartening growth of scholarly exchange now between Russian and Western scholars which less than twenty-five years ago was almost unknown. If any criticism could be made of this volume, it would be that more careful editing was needed; a number of fairly important slips have gone unspotted, among which the most serious are Ivashkin's own erroneous claim that Mikhail Bakhtin spent time in a Soviet camp (he appealed against his sentence on health grounds and was permitted to live out his sentence in internal exile), Vladimir Orlov's comment that Daniil Kharms shared Nikolai Oleinikov's iniquitous fate in being executed in 1937 (his own was no less pitiful; he died, probably of starvation, as a prisoner in blockaded Leningrad) and a minor confusion in Barsova's chapter about the publication date and arranger of Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony piano duet (details are correct in her Appendix but wrong on page 176). But overall, though all edited volumes of this kind are uneven to some extent, and some of the chapters here are much stronger than others, there are no truly weak contributions, and some are outstanding.

The first section is a collection of hermeneutic analyses by Elizabeth Wilson, Ivashkin, Gilbert C. Rappaport and Ivan Sokolov, showing that this particular tradition of discussing Shostakovich's music is still thriving. Both Wilson and Ivashkin focus on quotation and self-quotation as a means of teasing out meaning; Sokolov is more concerned with presenting the sequence of self-quotations in the Viola Sonata – itself no mean feat of musical detective work. He finds phrases from every single one of Shostakovich's symphonies (with the exception of the Eleventh) in the Sonata's finale: simply to see almost the whole cycle of fifteen symphonies placed side by side in this elegiac reminiscence is incredibly moving. Rappaport's thoughtful detailed survey of the Five Satires on Verses of Sasha Cherny is a particularly successful addition to the body of hermeneutic-analytical literature on Shostakovich's music, while Ivashkin presents ingenious arguments to prove that a particular feature of Shostakovich's writing used after the 1936 attacks on him in Pravda has its source in the stepwise, flat-modal contour of Old Believers' chant. This close-woven, rhythmically stolid style is, he claims, used by Musorgsky at the end of Khovanshchina, where the Old Believers' chant before their self-immolation is written in the ‘obikhod’ mode. Ivashkin's argument that such a source automatically rendered Shostakovich's music more conservative and hence more officially desirable is paradoxically convincing. It would be ironic if it were true, given the browbeaten status of the Orthodox Church under Stalin (disregarding the ‘outsider’ status of Old Believers who broke with the Church during the Petrine reforms), but Ivashkin's claim is convincing nonetheless because the deep connection between this chant-like melodic unfolding and Russian folk song does, in fact, impart to Shostakovich's music precisely the kinship with folk song that was urged upon him in the wake of his public humiliation.

In the film section, Eric Heine's chapter on Hamlet adds to the still very small body of work available on Shostakovich's films scores, while John Riley performs a whistle-stop tour of Shostakovich's films featuring Lenin and Stalin. Noting that film depictions of Lenin were rare (though the printed clip from The Vyborg Side shows the actor playing him bore a truly uncanny likeness to the dead dictator), Riley demonstrates the tightrope-walk taken by all those involved in films about Stalin, not least in The Vyborg Side itself, where – after Khrushchev's speech in 1956 – Stalin was himself airbrushed from the film, doubtless using the same techniques that film-makers and photographers had perfected over the last twenty years in removing Stalin's rivals and enemies from images and film footage. Olga Dombrovskaya's chapter argues that, at least in some cases, Shostakovich's involvement with film scores was as intense as with any ‘pure’ instrumental or orchestral genre. Her discussion of Shostakovich's close collaboration with Grigori Kozintsev reveals much about their working practice. Composer and director were not always in perfect harmony, though Shostakovich accepted that, when it came to the film score, Kozintsev's word had to be final. But in her detailed account of Shostakovich's work on King Lear, she shows how totally immersed in the work Shostakovich became and how, in the end, he and Kozintsev reached complete concordance over the music, with Shostakovich so attracted to the moods and themes thrown up by the film that he returned to them immediately in his Thirteenth Quartet.

Inna Barsova's chapter shows how Shostakovich and his contemporaries kept alive – for just one more generation – the practice of arranging new music for piano duet and meeting in groups to play and discuss it. Of the famous piano duet arrangement of Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony – the only version of the work to be performed publicly until its resurrection in 1961 – Barsova notes that the first movement was actually performed in the Moscow Conservatoire in the 1957–58 academic year by Shostakovich's student Boris Tishchenko (with Vadim Zherekov) and the whole symphony was played (by Tishchenko with a different partner) in a student concert the following year.

Terry Klefstad's account of Lady Macbeth's reception in America during the 1930s invites some interesting comparisons with that in Britain. Compared with its vicious reception in London (concert performance only), American critics show themselves to be immeasurably more broad-minded and alert to the opera's political tensions than were their London counterparts who merely sneered at its populism. Orlov's chapter on ‘Soviet Eros’ raises some pertinent issues relating to official attitudes to sexuality and art in the Soviet period. It shouldn't be surprising to find that much art and public display of the Stalin era conveys a kind of ‘healthy’ athletic sexuality focused on the approved activities of sport, militarism and labour – the same has been said often enough about Nazi and Italian fascist art of the same period. I only wish Orlov had said a little more about why it was that the Soviet regime did not repress human sexuality so much as affection and playfulness – artistic evidence of tender human relationships outside the official sphere.

Finally, Olga Digonskaya's account of the genesis and eventual recycling of the opera project The People's Will is a tour-de-force of detective work. Her meticulous fact-checking and cross-referencing produce a hypothesis that sits well with what we know of Shostakovich's personal life and career trajectory in the mid-1930s: in love with the translator Elena Konstantinovskaya, Shostakovich named his heroine after her (though the libretto calls her Anna) and planned a whole opera around her, casting her as the ‘heroine’ (in Soviet terms) who assassinated Tsar Alexander II, Sofya Perovskaya. Then when the murder of Sergei Kirov rendered completing the opera an act of suicidal proportions, Shostakovich and his librettist Alexander Preis scrapped it altogether, whereupon the music found its way into the finale of the Fourth Symphony, complete with ‘Elena's Theme’ as identified by Shostakovich himself on the single scrap of manuscript paper that survived those dangerous years. It is a distinguished conclusion to an excellent set of essays.