Problems of perspective

Nearly thirty years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, we have got used to seeing the Bolshevik Revolution as the prelude to a failed political experiment, albeit one that lasted a remarkably long time. But why do we see it as a failure? After all, the Soviet Union was a vast empire regarded as the military equal of the United States, feared and hated by successive US presidents, whose influence extended far beyond Soviet borders to include regimes in Africa, South East Asia, Central and South America. Had Mikhail Gorbachev not been removed in 1991, and had the Soviet system been able to reform itself into something like the form of communism we see today in China, no one would regard those seventy-plus years of Soviet power as a failure at all. What is meant by failure, in truth, is not really military or economic failure so much as a failure to sustain and uphold the ideals of equality and social justice that originally drew so many to the communist cause. The haemorrhaging of members from the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in 1956, for instance, was a result of widespread feelings of shock and disgust after Nikita Khrushchev's revelations at the Twenty-First Party Conference that year, at which he delivered his so-called ‘secret speech’ condemning Stalin's regime.Footnote ¹ For those who left the CPGB, and other communist parties across Western Europe, it was painful to realize that what they had for decades dismissed as ‘anti-Soviet propaganda’ had in fact been accurate reportage. Most shocking of all was learning that the mass arrests and disappearances of the 1930s, and even the show trials of prominent Politburo and party members, were not proportionate, if regrettable, responses to plots to murder Stalin and overthrow Soviet power at all, but rather Stalinist crimes of epic and tragic proportions. Right up to the end of the Communist regime in Russia, reports of political and religious repression, the continued use of the Gulag system, confinement and forced treatment of dissidents in mental hospitals, literary and other cultural censorship continued to filter through the Iron Curtain.

Disgust at these excesses naturally filtered through into the West's reception of Soviet cultural production. As Soviet dissident movements gained traction during the 1960s onward, Western commentators began to distinguish between art and artists that could be regarded as ‘dissident’ and those that were comfortably ‘establishment’, or conformist. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the exiled author of The Gulag Archipelago, was as clearly a Soviet dissident as Dmitri Shostakovich, the most well-known face of Soviet music abroad, was ‘establishment’, even if not a clear-cut ‘conformist’. The appeal of Soviet dissidence over conformity to Western observers, though entirely understandable in the context of the Cold War, led to an over-reliance on political disaffection as a marker of artistic quality, and a corresponding anxiety when (as in Shostakovich's case) a Soviet artist's popularity could not be accompanied by narratives of oppression, such as was the case with Boris Pasternak, forbidden to accept his Nobel Prize for Literature for Doctor Zhivago in 1958 (David Lean's film starring Julie Christie and Omar Sharif swiftly followed the author's subsequent disgraceful treatment at the hands of his Soviet peers). If the Soviets had banned something, then Western interest was instantly piqued; unfortunately, it was just as tempting to assume that anything ‘conformist’ was dull, third-rate, and stylistically behind the times.

The seductive appeal of this Manichean viewpoint in Western capitalist democracies is sustained further by the lack of translations of ‘approved’ Soviet-era literature (so we are left assuming it was mostly inferior to our own), our ignorance of Soviet visual culture (ditto) and our general lack of understanding about the more positive aspects of ordinary Soviet life: access to universal education and healthcare, full employment, mass housing, heavily subsidised tickets to theatres, concerts, and other cultural pursuits, all of which could not be guaranteed in the richest Western nations during the same decades. In other words, we are still not really in a position to make full like-with-like comparisons between life in communist Russia and that in Western capitalist democracies, still less weigh up its cultural pros and cons from a truly informed perspective. As a result, the casual preconceptions and generalizations look set to continue. Depending on our own political inclinations, we might hazard the view that, though a Soviet citizen may not be able to practise their religion freely, they at least had a place to live and did not have to worry about heating bills; or we might say that a British citizen may leave school unable to speak any foreign languages but at least they have not been brainwashed into believing in communism. Sections of the British press and political classes still reach for the epithet ‘Stalinist’ to describe any course of action they regard as detrimental to the interests of big business as though such detriment is so self-evidently negative it needs no more sophisticated critique.

Why does any of this still matter? Aside from ongoing debates about the respective merits of free-market capitalism, neoliberal economics, and market control within a socialist democracy, Anglophone musicology – which, though a tiny demographic, is nonetheless one which reflects broader social preoccupations – has still not really come to terms with the legacy of the Russian Revolution. This is apparent not only in writings about Shostakovich (though thankfully these debates are now much less polarized than they were) but also in the problematizing of mainstream Soviet musical culture, especially of the Stalin era. To some extent, our difficulty with the repertoire casually deemed ‘socialist realist’ (by which we generally mean stylistically anachronistic and therefore compromised) is just another manifestation of still-unresolved mistrust and resentment towards music that appeals to a wide audience. That such music might merit the term ‘modern’ via a completely different set of criteria to those habitually assumed in Western capitalist democracies is still a fairly radical suggestion, despite the fact that other products of Stalinist culture, such as architecture, sculpture, urban planning, and mass construction of vast state-owned enterprises such as the Moscow Metro, were all quintessentially ‘modern’, and we acknowledge that quite readily. In fact, all those enterprises were driven by precisely the same utilitarian impulse as that which demanded that Soviet composers should write music accessible to the masses. One could plausibly argue that the line of argument developed so convincingly by writers of all shades of the political spectrum in the 1920s and 1930s – Theodor Adorno, Clement Greenberg, José Ortega y Gasset – which correlated mass popularity with low quality, was itself anything but ‘modern’.Footnote ² Rather, it was a natural extension of the previous century's bourgeois urge to out-do one's neighbour with an ostentatious display of one's own superior knowledge and taste: the scorning of cheerful entertainment, popular fiction, and mass-produced domestic objects in favour of the difficult and obscure. Or, in the parlance of 1930s (and later in the 1960s) cultural arbiters in Britain and North America, the ‘highbrow’ scorning of ‘middlebrow’ culture.Footnote ³

Dmitri Shostakovich, the composer who is still pre-eminent among his Soviet contemporaries, has had his reputation shaped by all these factors and so makes an excellent case study. First of all, until the publication of Solomon Volkov's fraudulent memoir of the composer, Testimony, in 1979, there was a large Western constituency that regarded Shostakovich as morally as well as artistically compromised.Footnote ⁴ The conductor Georg Solti, for instance, confessed that until he read Testimony, he saw Shostakovich precisely in that light, and only began conducting his music in the 1980s once Volkov's book had convinced him that Shostakovich was a classic ‘internal émigré’.Footnote ⁵ Second, there was an elite musical constituency who regarded his music as essentially second-rate populism: the opinion of Pierre Boulez that Shostakovich was a ‘third pressing of Mahler’ is often cited as typical of this group.Footnote ⁶ Third, a significant part of Shostakovich's favourable reception in the West has been drawn from post-Testimony narratives of him as a tragic victim of Stalinism: an image that is both insulting and glibly reductive. Thus bound by these three strands of Cold War prejudice, Shostakovich's posthumous reputation perfectly illustrates the limitations of all of them: despised for his politics; despised by self-styled highbrow elites for his ‘accessible’ music; pitied for being a Soviet citizen. Until we achieve a more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of how Soviet society worked, both for good and for ill, the reality of Shostakovich's career – the accommodations, the compromises, the advantages, the successes and joys as well as the tragedies – will always remain a mystery to us.

The Soviet Union's state-run art music culture operated alongside those of Western nations on its own ideological terms: it had different advantages and disadvantages, and both sides of the Iron Curtain were busily engaged in discrediting the achievements of the other. Even now, the discrediting and othering of Soviet Russians endures. In a series of BBC Proms talks in the summer of 2018, Sir John Tusa, the former arts director of London's Barbican Centre and currently co-chair of the European Youth Orchestra, observed that it took ‘us’ a very long time to ‘realize’ that the Soviet Union aimed to reinforce political, as well as cultural, dominance through the apparently benign processes of musical exchange. It did not seem to occur to Sir John, in his unremittingly hostile presentation of Soviet cultural activity in Britain during that talk, that Western cultural bodies were playing exactly the same game. Even commenting on the male dancers of the Bolshoi, Sir John offered the view that, through these talented vessels of cultural display, the Soviets gave us ‘a demonstration of the power of Soviet manhood . . . They were examples of the superiority of the communist system. And when orchestras played brilliantly, that also was a demonstration of the superiority of the Soviet system. It was all intensely politicized . . . We . . . woke up to this aspect of the cultural Cold War rather late.’ Footnote ⁷ That openly one-sided, profoundly anti-Soviet heritage of the Cold War is difficult – perhaps for some impossible – to transcend and we are held constantly at a disadvantage by lack of knowledge through which to draw fair comparisons.

Imagined histories

There is one sense, above all, in which the Russian Revolution produced a seismic shift in Russia's musical culture, and that is through exile and emigration. Picture a European musical scene without the events of 1917: Igor Stravinsky would have continued to shuttle unimpeded between the family estate in Ustilug, Ukraine, and Paris after the cessation of war in 1918, having his ballets staged at the Bolshoi and working in Paris, Moscow, and St Petersburg as a matter of course; Prokofiev would have tried his hand at European fame before resuming his career in St Petersburg or Moscow, yet always free to continue his travels; Serge Rachmaninoff would have continued to compose his neo-Romantic music, a beloved and familiar presence on Russian concert platforms; the private concert series of Serge Koussevitsky and Aleksandr Ziloti, and more besides, would have championed major new works of Russian, American, and European composers. Shostakovich would have made his career surrounded by these glittering contemporaries; he would have competed with them, been inspired by them and travelled freely abroad, just as they did after leaving Russia. They would all have enjoyed the kinds of international, cosmopolitan careers typical of Russian musicians before 1917.

Even as it was, the extent to which non-Russian musicians managed to retain Leningrad and Moscow as destinations for their international tours in the 1920s and 1930s is remarkable. Soviet Russia was not a backwater even under Stalin; Moscow and St Petersburg had been on touring schedules before 1917 and they continued to be major performing destinations, even though artists often had to endure far greater levels of bureaucracy and indeed chaos than was normal before the Revolution.Footnote ⁸ The American singers Roland Hayes and Marian Anderson performed there before the war, as did a succession of exiles from Nazi Germany conducting Soviet orchestras (Otto Klemperer, Fritz Stiedry, even – briefly – Bruno Walter). Western composers including Alban Berg, Béla Bartók, Henry Cowell, and Arthur Honegger visited both Russian cities in order to perform – or hear performed – their music. Soviet musicians themselves, however, were more restricted. The Soviet Union's sealed borders made foreign travel a cumbersome bureaucratic process, to which only elite and approved citizens had access. Shostakovich, for instance, travelled extensively in the post-Stalin era, but the first half of his career was spent almost exclusively within Soviet borders. Though he and his contemporaries were kept reasonably abreast of musical developments in Europe and North America through imported scores and visits of foreign musicians, they never had anything like the exposure to new music that they would have had in urban centres outside the Soviet Union; nor did their Western peers have much opportunity to hear new Soviet music either. And once the Cold War had begun in the late 1940s, even these modest exchanges came to an end. Stravinsky and Shostakovich were completely estranged, personally and musically: when they finally met in 1962, Stravinsky's severe underestimation of his younger compatriot's work was encapsulated in his patronizing instruction to Shostakovich to ‘go beyond Mahler’,Footnote ⁹ as though by 1962 Shostakovich was ignorant of new Western music composed since 1911. The lack of understanding was entirely Stravinsky's, whose cast-iron assumption that Shostakovich was the unfortunate provincial and he the sophisticated cosmopolitan was absolutely typical of Western cultural arrogance in that period, and indeed far beyond it.

Without the Bolshevik-enforced separation of musical cultures, we might even ponder whether some of the more radical Western compositional trends of the post-war era, stoked by loathing of totalitarianism and propaganda, and encouraged by governments eager to see clear water between their cultural achievements and those of the Soviet Union, would have become quite so dominant. For there is no doubt that the Cold War fostered a polarization of approaches to new music, even though this happened for multiple reasons, not all of which were ideological. Had a non-Soviet Russia joined with the Allies in the Second World War – for my alternative history is not airbrushing Nazism from the European picture – then the reaction against music as propaganda and the horrors of the Holocaust would still have evoked a strong response in composers of Boulez's generation. Perhaps their creative responses would have been identical, regardless of whether there had been a Soviet Union or not, since the existence of ‘Soviet music’ played little or no part in their search for fresh, uncorrupted musical languages. But what would certainly have been different in this Soviet-less post-war era was the swift emergence of a Cold War rhetoric underpinning the rise of that radical avant-garde. As Amy C. Beal showed in her study of cultural activity in Germany from ‘zero hour’, and as Danielle Fosler-Lussier has revealed in her study of American cultural missions abroad in the same period, the United States was demonstrably anxious about its cultural image in Europe in the post-war era and sought to position itself against Soviet Russia as a bastion of progressive cultural values. Soviet Russia's image as a dusty cultural backwater was built out of the ashes of war-torn Europe; a ‘backward’ Russia was the required stooge for the carefully nurtured images of the ‘progressive’ United States and Western Europe.Footnote ¹⁰

Lying at the root of it all was both the rapidly escalating nuclear arms race and fears about Soviet expansion into Eastern Europe. It was high time, indeed, to begin an aggressive process of ‘othering’ the Soviet enemy. Russian composers could not participate in the European creation of multiple tabulae rasae; they were forced to stand back, become alien, unwelcome, and be scrutinised for their dissidence or complicity. The speed with which this happened is poignantly illustrated by the crowds urging ‘Shosti’ to jump out of his hotel window ‘like Kasiankina’ when he was part of the Soviet delegation to the Peace Conference at New York's Waldorf-Astoria hotel in 1949. This was because very recently, a Soviet schoolteacher called Kasiankina, who worked in a school attached to the Soviet Consulate there, had sought political asylum by leaping from her hotel room window into a crowd of waiting Americans.Footnote ¹¹ Already, it seems, America was ready to embrace Shostakovich as ‘ours’ rather than ‘theirs’; for how could such a talent truly wish to live in the Soviet Union? Soviet composers and their music thus became pawns in a graceless game of cultural one-upmanship between East and West; while politicians and their cultural officers sought exchange visits and fostered the image of music as a form of ‘soft power’, composers themselves – and musicologists with them – unravelled attempts at mutual understanding by effectively doing the politicians’ propaganda work for them. For it was musicians and scholars, not politicians, who condemned each other's work, who (in the West) produced textbook histories of twentieth-century music that made no mention of Shostakovich, and who taught generations of music students to despise his music and that of his compatriots.Footnote ¹²

Final thoughts

It seems extraordinary to think that a single political coup a century ago could have had such seismic effects, not only on millions of individual lives (for such is true of any significant war or totalitarian regime) but also in university and conservatoire classrooms, on the way composers write music, how critics review it, how orchestras promote their repertoire, on the very ways in which we think about art music. How could we, happy citizens of the free democratic West, find ourselves (not to put too fine a point on it) so brainwashed? Surely that was the preserve of Soviet citizens, not us? By painting Soviet composers into a corner, we did the same thing to ourselves. It would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that, where Stalin led, we all followed: at the top of the Cold War power pyramid, Stalin and Lavrentiy Beria began the Soviet nuclear weapons programme that begat the whole post-war culture of intensive espionage, nuclear proliferation, and the space race and underpinned the fears felt by generations of schoolchildren (on both sides of the Iron Curtain) of a nuclear holocaust. Somewhere in the middle, state-enabled cultural and foreign affairs bodies ran exchange programmes to both showcase their own achievements and to keep at least some communication channels open; while nearer the bottom, artists, journalists, educators and scholars worked in remarkable tandem with their political leaders in aggressively ‘othering’ their geopolitical rivals, generally without even being aware of doing so. How easy it is to perceive this process going on in another country; how hard it is to recognize when we ourselves are doing it. Let us not do politicians’ work for them, still less that of politicians who have been dead for nearly seventy years: let us acknowledge that, above all else, it may be us that is wrong, and keep our minds – and our ears – open.