Throughout the disruptions and abrupt shifts of Soviet culture during the 1920s and 1930s, a small group of venerable musical institutions—Leningrad's Mariinskii Theater, Moscow's Bol'shoi, and the Leningrad and Moscow Philharmonics—remained sites of striking continuity. From the eve of the revolution until the eve of World War II, the repertories of these institutions remained remarkably stable. Concertgoers enjoyed a steady diet of nineteenth-century European classics, peppered after 1917 with both works of European modernism and recent Soviet compositions. Even as nationalism and xenophobia increasingly colored public discourse and state politics during the late 1930s, programming changed only in terms of balance. Russian and Soviet offerings went up, but not that much: western European classics remained staples. In Classics for the Masses, Pauline Fairclough asks why concert life in Soviet Russia's top cities remained so “thoroughly international in scope” (109) for so long. This line of questioning leads Fairclough to consider “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).

As in most places during the early twentieth century, the nineteenth-century European classics remained undeniable audience favorites. That popularity is only half of the story in Fairclough's analysis, however. She argues that the Soviets rendered these works ideologically acceptable by “rebranding” their composers, a transformation that allowed them to weather the storms of the Cultural Revolution. A central example was the sacred (and very German) music of J.S. Bach, which enjoyed wide popularity during the mid 1930s. It was tuneful and therefore attractive stuff, to be sure. Yet new, Marxist readings of Bach's biography also sanctioned these works ideologically by insisting that their sacred topics were a mere consequence of their composer's historical condition. In the wake of the notorious 1936 attack on Dmitrii Shostakovich in Pravda, bureaucrats even offered Bach's works (and other western classics) as models for supposedly misguided contemporary Soviet composers. Fairclough maintains that with Bach and a handful of other composers, we find a remarkable alignment of personal taste and bureaucratic positioning. For instance, as Soviet audiences applauded the grand choruses of Giuseppe Verdi's 1874 Requiem, ideologues could also praise the work for its epic scale, a quality demanded of art by the anti-formalist campaigns of the later 1930s. The ideologues—many of them musicologists and music critics—did not limit their rebranding to western European composers. The arch-cosmopolitan Petr Tchaikovskii emerged as a nationalist icon after his biography was sent though a meat grinder of redaction and reassembly, for example. Audiences continued to enjoy his music just as they always had. The real victim of the post-1936 era was a palpable drop in the performance of western modernist repertory, a change that Fairclough suggests resulted from prudent self-censorship on the part of repertory committees rather than any top-down pressure.

Fairclough argues that the international scope of institutional repertory and its concomitant rebranding constitute a large-scale appropriation of both western culture and pre-Revolutionary Russian culture in the Soviet sphere. In this respect her work resonates with Katerina Clark's Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941 (2011), though Fairclough demonstrates that the clearly defined periods of internationalism and nationalism Clark charts were, in fact, far more blurred in music. Fairclough's focus on institutional music-making also broadens the remit of Soviet music studies, preoccupied as it has been with the plights of individual composers (particularly the perennial favorite Shostakovich). A notable exception is Marina Raku's recent study Muzykal'naia klassika v mifotvorchestve sovetskoi epokhi (2014), which covers similar territory as Classics for the Masses. Although Raku and Fairclough share many conclusions, Raku lacks the grounding of Fairclough's commendable archival sleuthing, which brings the behind-the-scenes mechanics of programming to light. Indeed, Fairclough is the first to assemble a broad picture of music making in Soviet Russia's elite institutions and the ways in which it differed from other Soviet arts. Even though she assumes substantial fluency in Soviet musical culture and pan-European musical trends, Classics for the Masses is essential reading for any scholar of Stalinist culture.