The course of thought I pursue here began with a hunch: namely that the Wikipedia entry on ‘20th-Century Music’ would fail to mention Shostakovich. I checked, and my suspicions were confirmed.Footnote ¹ Shostakovich, certainly among the handful of twentieth-century composers whose music is standard concert repertoire, and possibly the best known of all in wider cultural discourse, simply doesn't feature in this article. But this was not merely a wild guess of mine, and the lacuna in the Wikipedia entry was not a random oversight. The category ‘twentieth-century music’ has, after all, become entrenched as an ideological label even though it has the superficial form of a simple chronological term. The writers of encyclopedia articles or textbooks on ‘twentieth-century music’ offer us their narratives of ‘modernism’ in music, but since Shostakovich has been excluded from such narratives, the mere accident of a lifespan falling within the twentieth century cannot help him. And if even the world-famous Shostakovich is an outsider, what hope is there for all the other music of ‘socialist realism’?

Now it is true that Shostakovich has received his share of musicological attention elsewhere: in his homeland, every note of his music and every day of his life are examined with endless care, while in the West, his life's story provoked what was probably the most exciting debate musicology has ever seen.Footnote ² But precisely because of this, he remains in a historical and methodological ghetto, trapped within narratives of oppression and resistance, collaboration and victimhood.Footnote ³ He is ruled out of the modernist narrative of technical progress, despite the fact that in his earlier years he was aggressively modernist, whether in his hectic First Piano Sonata, the Third and Fourth Symphonies or his absurdist ‘anti-opera’ The Nose; the impenetrably dense textures in the opening minutes of his Second Symphony (1927) remained without rival until the 1960s. Similarly, the recent surge of interest in Prokofiev is welcome in itself, but also locates him as a victim of oppression, still more helpless than Shostakovich.Footnote ⁴

With regard to the Wikipedia entry, some sceptical readers might still suspect that the absence of Shostakovich is just an aberration of the rather informal collective-authorship approach of that internet resource. Let us then survey the printed textbooks that form the backbone of twentieth-century music courses. Here we find the same behaviour. Robert Morgan's Anthology of Twentieth-Century Music doesn't include a single example from Prokofiev or Shostakovich.Footnote ⁵ Eric Salzman's Twentieth-Century Music: An Introduction devotes three perfunctory pages to them (out of a total of 250 pages); the lack of interest in Soviet music results in careless errors such as the suppositions that Edison Denisov was a ‘Kiev composer’, Arvo Pärt a ‘Latvian composer’.Footnote ⁶ This amounts to contempt: imagine such a book telling us of ‘the Berlin composer Schoenberg’ or of ‘Bartók, the leading light of Czech music’.

Admittedly, these are both older books, although they have been printed many times without any improvement or correction in these areas. Surely we can expect some sort of corrective in a recent ‘twentieth-century music’ textbook. And so we turn to Elliott Antokoletz's A History of Twentieth-Century Music in a Theoretic-Analytical Context, published in 2013.Footnote ⁷ But this palms us off with much the same old story: the book devotes its first three chapters to Schoenberg alone, while Prokofiev and Shostakovich jointly have to wait until Chapter 13, entitled ‘The Music of Soviet Composers and Socialist Realism’; tellingly, Antokoletz abandons his ‘theoretic-analytical’ approach here, and instead offers us a rather rudimentary account of the Soviet political context. Like his predecessors, he shows no interest in Shostakovich's and Prokofiev's modernism: instead, every Russian composer is discussed as a bearer of ‘national traits’ – even Scriabin is submitted to this approach. By Antokoletz's standards, Shostakovich and Prokofiev are doubly excluded from the musical mainstream: first, they supposedly failed to rise to the modernist challenge, and secondly, they are in any case only fancy-dress composers of the distant East. Similarly, all post-war eastern European composers are lumped together in a chapter entitled ‘Synthesis of National Characteristics’.

This ghettoization has even influenced writers like Alex Ross, whose widely acclaimed book The Rest Is Noise set out to challenge precisely this modernism-led narrative by lavishing attention on composers who were normally considered too ‘conservative’ for musicological consideration.Footnote ⁸ The general intention was no doubt laudable, but in practice Ross followed the standard pattern by placing Prokofiev and Shostakovich in a chapter entitled ‘The Art of Fear’.

The onus to break up this modernist hegemony falls on those whose subjects of study have been excluded from this standard narrative of twentieth-century modernism: it is up to them (and I include myself here) to shake up the monumental complacency that mainstream historiography has displayed in this area. It is perhaps unsurprising that the most significant shift of ground has been effected by Richard Taruskin, since he not only made a notable contribution to Shostakovich studies, but also previously managed to liberate nineteenth-century Russian composers from their historiographical ghetto of nationalism.Footnote ⁹

The last two volumes of Taruskin's Oxford History of Western Music overturned the master narrative of twentieth-century music history as a story of inexorable innovation, instead placing their emphasis on political and social matters.Footnote ¹⁰ He took the very approach that had previously been applied to socialist realism, and turned it on modernism instead, asking, ‘Who paid the piper?’, just as Frances Stonor Saunders had done for literature and the visual arts in the cold-war West.Footnote ¹¹ Taruskin showed how the advance of ultra-modernism after the Second World War had been conditioned by cold-war ideology and that it was ultimately financed by the CIA. The primary research, admittedly, had been carried out by others – not only by Saunders, but by others working more specifically on music, such as Ian Wellens in his Music on the Frontline.Footnote ¹² But this and other such pieces of work could easily have remained as unconnected fragments, providing no broader picture beyond their specialist niches. Taruskin's application of that research to his authoritative and very widely circulated history of Western music signalled a redefinition of the field that applied to all scholars. It quickly provoked hostile reactions left, right and centre, perhaps most prominently from Charles Rosen, who stepped forward to defend both the autonomy of music and the autonomy of its practitioners – though only where the Western side of the cold-war divide was concerned.Footnote ¹³ In his reply to Rosen, Taruskin drew a wickedly provocative parallel between Elliott Carter and Tikhon Khrennikov:

We could make one small correction to this comparison, because Khrennikov's light music, such as his popular songs and operettas, actually did enjoy a large audience, which is only somewhat reduced in present-day Russia. Taruskin is no doubt aware of this, but preferred not to blunt his rhetorical purpose in what was not, after all, a scholarly article. Still, if we restrict the comparison to Khrennikov's more earnest works, the parallel does indeed hold.

Taruskin successfully put the post-war avant-garde in its proper social and political context, but in the spirit of his project I suggest that we now take a further step and bring Prokofiev and Shostakovich into the new and much enriched mainstream historical narrative. Taruskin praises The Love for Three Oranges for breaking down the fourth wall and drawing its alienating devices from the eighteenth century, declaring that it thus becomes ‘an indispensable link in the history of twentieth-century opera’.Footnote ¹⁵ But ‘in the final analysis, The Love for Three Oranges came by its irony the old-fashioned way’, its music is ‘ingratiating’ and it makes an ‘unpretentious impression’.Footnote ¹⁶ I think reception history perhaps allows us to go further than this, since the first audiences found the opera outrageously nonsensical, and in general there is still room for debate over the importance of Prokofiev in the emergence of modernist neoclassicism, even if Stravinsky remains pre-eminent here. Taruskin's Shostakovich is still placed in a chapter entitled ‘Music and Totalitarian Society’. I suggest we take the next step by, for example, discussing how Lady Macbeth was given wide international exposure, leaving its mark on the development of twentieth-century opera (on Britten, for example). We could also explore the opera's grotesque and dehumanizing element not only in relation to its Stalinist context, but also in relation to Western modernist aesthetics, as eloquently theorized by José Ortega y Gasset.

Taruskin's model has engendered a whole trend of musicological cold-war studies,Footnote ¹⁷ but unsurprisingly, this trend has largely been focused on the new positioning of US music, while there are scant signs as yet of any reciprocal change in approaches to socialist realism. But even if the cold-war angle has not so far transformed the study of socialist realist music, we can confidently say that it has opened the way for future studies that would have seemed illegitimate under the standard modernist narrative.

Returning to Taruskin's critics, we shall now take an example that stands at the opposite end of the spectrum from Rosen, namely, J. P. E. Harper-Scott, whose leftist scholarship revolves around two relatively conservative English composers, Elgar and Walton.Footnote ¹⁸ Taruskin's cold-war axis is an unwelcome development for Harper-Scott because it seems to bypass Western Europe (or to present it merely as a US colony), and it therefore sheds no new light on his own field. Harper-Scott sees fit to devote about a fifth of his book to a polemical treatment of Taruskin's alleged ideological shortcomings, but for present purposes we will pass on to his own attempt to reconceive modernism. His desire to ‘expand’ the concept, already evident in his earlier study of Elgar, reaches its apogee in his book on Walton, where he presents a ‘modernism without shores’, as he calls it: ‘The definition of modernism must encompass all music of the twentieth century, and not just a privileged group of works by a group of nominated composers’; ‘The idea of modernism is not a single entity but a set of constructions of wildly differing ideologies.’Footnote ¹⁹ Despite his recourse to some heavy theoretical apparatus, Harper-Scott's central idea can be expressed in straightforward terms: he argues that the central event of modernism, the ‘emancipation of dissonance’, affected every composer of the twentieth century, no matter whether that composer defined himself as a modernist, or only assimilated some elements of modernism, or even reacted against it. Harper-Scott thus places composers on a modernist spectrum from ‘faithful’ to ‘reactive’; his hero, Walton, for example, passes from youthful ‘faithfulness’ to a ‘reactive’ maturity. This double-sided modernism can encompass even a composer like Rachmaninov, in spite of the fact that his style was much the same either side of the modernist watershed: even if the difference cannot be picked out from the details of the score, the later music should be seen in the context of new anxieties and internal struggles. Subtle stylistic modernizations performed by fundamentally ‘conservative’ composers are significant, and even when they are completely absent, they indicate a conscious resistance to modernist innovation (in contrast to the prelapsarian innocence of the composer's youth).Footnote ²⁰

Now let us look at another attempt to chip away at the modernist monolith, this time in the sphere of the visual arts: namely, the collection of essays Totalitarian Art and Modernity, edited by Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen and Jacob Wamberg.Footnote ²¹ The editors list grievances similar to those I have outlined at the beginning of my paper, such as the exclusion of so-called ‘totalitarian art’ in the major art anthology Art since 1900.Footnote ²² Much as we often blame Adorno for such exclusions, they blame Clement Greenberg, the author of the famous 1939 essay ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’.Footnote ²³ Rasmussen and Wamberg state their aims thus:

This quotation already points to one of the approaches in the collection: it is that phrase ‘the less totalitarian states’ which might strike you as rather novel. Indeed, one of the key essays in the volume is Rasmussen's own, ‘Approaching Totalitarianism and Totalitarian Art’, which attempts to dismantle the cold-war opposition of totalitarian states and the ‘free world’. The word ‘totalitarian’ has a long history. Not only was it used for critical purposes, but it could be endorsed as a positive system (as it was by Mussolini). However, as Rasmussen points out, in the wake of the Second World War the word came to be used exclusively to condemn the Nazi and Soviet systems in one breath, as if they were self-evidently evil twins. This meaning of the word was sharply political and served as a bogeyman to scare off any kind of opposition to liberal democracy, or indeed today's neoliberalism. Slavoj Žižek formulated this idea vividly:

To counteract this easy, unthinking acceptance of the term, Rasmussen follows Giorgio Agamben's analysis of the post-9/11 world, which highlights the ‘state of exception’ (Ausnahmezustand) where a sovereign is able to suspend the rule of law in the name of public good.Footnote ²⁶ Such an act dissolves the borderline between democracy and totalitarian rule, as Rasmussen says: ‘The “war on terror” launches a transformation where the constitutional state is replaced by a permanent state of exception. […] The “war on terror” takes place indefinitely and on an unspecified battlefield, against an enemy which is periodically redefined.’Footnote ²⁷ What does all of this have to do with art or music? It gives us an understanding that the notions of totalitarianism and totalitarian art are vestiges of the cold war, and also that the very use of the term leads us back to simplistic dichotomies between the free and unfree worlds and their free and unfree art. Unpacking the term ‘totalitarianism’ starts the job of undermining the ‘prejudice of superiority’, which is indeed a position from which most Western histories are written. As Danielle Fossler-Lussier wrote in her book about Bartók's reception:

Now let us look for signs of inclusive history from the other side, from post-Soviet Russia. The majority of music educational institutions there still teach Russian music history in courses sealed off from what they call ‘the history of foreign music’, a term whose cold-war roots have been brilliantly exposed by Olga Manulkina in one of her recent essays.Footnote ²⁹ I have found only one institution, the Jewish Academy in Moscow, where the history of music is taught in a single stream. This practice of separating national music into a self-standing narrative is also prevalent in the countries of eastern Europe, even those which were never part of the Eastern bloc, such as the successor countries of the former Yugoslavia. It is so ingrained that colleagues over there could not believe that we in Cambridge do not teach an obligatory course on English or British music. (How come? Don't you have to learn about your own first?)Footnote ³⁰ I thought it best not to mention that students could spend their three years at Cambridge with barely a note of English music to be heard.

This unquestioned teaching habit removes any pressing need to consider Russian music in the world context, and so I have not been able to find anything useful produced by Russian musicologists with the exception of one ambitious volume from 1997 entitled Russian Music and the Twentieth Century.Footnote ³¹ This book is, in a sense, limited by its own title and the use of the conjunction ‘and’, which indicates that Russian music is still seen as being separate, somehow isolated from a ‘twentieth century’ that was happening elsewhere. The book did not set out to provide an integrated history of twentieth-century art music, but shouldered the more modest burden of reuniting the two severed parts of Russian music, that of ‘Soviet’ Russia and that of the émigrés. It was perhaps the first academic attempt to redefine Stravinsky as a Russian, since he had featured only in the foreign-music courses since the 1960s (and not at all in the previous three decades). By 2014, at the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games at Sochi, Stravinsky's complete acceptance in Russia was evident, since the musical self-portrait Russia presented to the world included both The Firebird and The Rite of Spring. Even so, absorbing Stravinsky into Russian music is one thing, while assimilating Soviet Russian music into an international twentieth-century narrative is quite another.

Although post-Soviet Russian musicology has failed to assemble such a narrative, the feat has been successfully carried out in the historiography of architecture. The crucial work here is Andrey Ikonnikov's magisterial two-volume history, entitled Twentieth-Century Architecture: Utopias and Reality.Footnote ³² I would like now to look at this work in some detail, since it would seem to offer a viable model for music historians. Ikonnikov's 2001 publication is quite early by post-Soviet standards for such a thoroughgoing reconsideration. He had even attempted it prior to the perestroika years, although without success: writing on Soviet architecture was fine; writing on foreign architecture was also fine; but merging the two together was too heterodox, and he had been able to publish only a version of the book that covered the foreign material. At least there was a serious readership for foreign culture in the later Soviet Union, but any attempt to treat Soviet and foreign on an equal footing was frowned upon as much as it was in the US.

Ikonnikov sees twentieth-century architecture as essentially pluralist: neoclassical and avant-garde movements developed side by side for three quarters of the century, merging to an extent in the postmodern trends of the last quarter. Radically different phenomena stemming from different chronological periods came to coincide in time and to share space with each other. Ikonnikov sees two main reasons for this: the stratification of architecture within a ‘mass society’ and the asynchronous development of national cultures. Ideological considerations are subordinate to these other two aspects in Ikonnikov's account. I found his discussion of stratified architecture particularly pertinent to the situation in music, and so I will quote liberally from the book. He sees three main strata in twentieth-century architecture:

When applying this scheme to music during the heyday of socialist realism, roughly between 1936 and 1956, we see that the top stratum was not available to Soviet composers. This is, of course, a very important consideration which should never be ignored: just as the modernist watershed demanded a reaction, positive or negative, from all composers, so the later Soviet rejection of modernism in the 1930s demanded a reaction from every Soviet composer. But we should not imagine that this local Soviet event somehow reversed or eradicated the memory of modernism – it did not do so at all; but it did manage to impose certain bounds.

The most promising of Ikonnikov's strata, for our purposes, is surely the second, in which work was nourished by ideas that had been worked out within elite modernism but then defused and combined with traditional features, the resulting synthesis executed with a high level of professionalism. This is where I would place the best of Soviet music from that 20-year span – the symphonies of Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Myaskovsky, for example, or the concertos of Khachaturian and Kabalevsky. It would perhaps be going a little too far to say that all such music responded to the needs of the mass consumer who had mastered basic cultural skills, but this is an adjustment particular to art music, which generally commands a smaller audience than most of the other arts (and certainly when compared with architecture, which can hardly be avoided). But it would be true to say that this music was enjoyed and appreciated at the very least by the Soviet intelligentsia, even though some of it was difficult listening. Works like Shostakovich's symphonies were challenging and strained listeners’ minds, much as elite modernism did in the West. The third stratum, if we are still to keep within the bounds of so-called serious music, would be pieces written to commission, to fulfil the demands of clients that do not particularly coincide with the composer's wishes. Here we could place Prokofiev's Songs of Our Days, op. 76, Shostakovich's Dolmatovsky Romances, op. 98, his film scores and perhaps even his oratorio Song of the Forests.

If we look at Western music, we will see that these strata are equally apparent. Elite modernism needs patronage if it is to spread beyond the narrowest circles of devotees. Where such patronage is absent, as was the case in Britain, for example, we find almost no trace of elite modernism. (Modernism took an equally long time to win support in British architecture.Footnote ³⁴) Walton switched from the top stratum to the middle as a matter of survival once his connection with the wealthy Sitwell family was broken.Footnote ³⁵ One can even say that Stravinsky's pioneering experimentation with styles ended with Diaghilev's death. Generally, public taste became king again after the Wall Street Crash of 1929, and the whole of elite modernism suffered a decline. Neoclassicism itself, although it has long since been accepted into the fold of the modernist narrative, proved to be a handy compromise with public taste and thus quickly entered the middle stratum. The third stratum also exists, of course, for serious Western composers, mainly in the shape of film scores. And as for the flow of ideas from top to bottom, we may recall the fashion for atonal scores in film and even television from the late 1950s to the early 1970s.

I would be very interested to read a history of the twentieth-century middle stratum. The related notion of the middlebrow was, of course, coined as a derogatory term, notably by Greenberg, and then applied to music by Adorno:

In a recent round table on modernism, Christopher Chowrimootoo advocated precisely this approach: that of following the leadership of literary studies – such as Joan Shelley Rubin's The Making of Middlebrow Culture (1992), Rosa Bracco's Merchants of Hope: British Middlebrow Writers and the First World War (1993) and Nicola Humble's The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s: Class, Domesticity, and Bohemianism (2001) – in focusing on this peculiar category.Footnote ³⁸ To do this, we need to abandon the high perch of elitism from which Ortega y Gasset, Greenberg, Adorno and Virginia Woolf poured scorn on the middlebrow, and instead reconceive it as a broad field where good literature, art and music can be enjoyed by the educated masses both intellectually and emotionally. This is, once again, a social approach that would investigate the relation of cultural produce to its audiences. In relating the middlebrow to socialist realism, one would need to distinguish between, on the one hand, music that fell flat and did not transform official support into public success and, on the other, music that was both officially acceptable and loved by the public. It is this aspect of public acceptance and love that takes a large proportion of socialist realist art beyond the realm of mere politically enforced ephemera.Footnote ³⁹

I envisage a study that would place the works by Soviet composers in the middlebrow culture surrounding them: a culture of ‘operatic greats’, classic novels and highly accomplished figurative painting, which all combined a desire for serious message with the prospect of an unforced pleasure. And ideally a study like this could spread westwards, to Europe and the rest of the Western world, because ‘middlebrow tastes’ around the world are often remarkably similar, as some postmodern artists have demonstrated.Footnote ⁴⁰ This would be a history which not only nods to public taste, but would be genuinely founded on statistics of popularity, on repertoire-worthiness, rather than on the works that influenced other composers and impressed musicologists.

To add my own 50 kopecks to the project of ‘inclusive history’, I shall outline two potential approaches that would allow us to find new ways of talking about Prokofiev and Shostakovich, and to find new and illuminating contexts for their music. On the couple of occasions when I presented this material to a live audience, I played a little trick at this point: I promised to play them a Shostakovich quartet, which I did eventually; but first, unannounced, I played the opening movement of Hindemith's String Quartet op. 32. Some recognized the switch, but most were happy to accept this as genuine Shostakovich. The mistake is by no means stupid: the music does indeed sound very much like a Shostakovich quartet from the composer's middle period, even though it was written by Hindemith in 1923. I am not interested here in making the simple point that Hindemith's chamber music was an important ingredient of Shostakovich's style. What interests me is that in spite of the many striking similarities, quartets like Hindemith's op. 32 and Shostakovich's Eighth seem to be confined to non-overlapping magisteria within musicological discourse, such that a comparison of the two works simply cannot arise. With Shostakovich, we are told, it is all about the hidden programme, the guilt and shame over his failure to stand up to oppression, the contemplation of suicide. It is all about the tortured artistic soul in its struggle with the state, and the music is perceived as ardent, desperate, even hysterical. With Hindemith, all we are told is that he wrote it very quickly and on the train, and we presume that because it was written for the Amar Quartet it should be classified as Gebrauchsmusik. All the musicological discussion of the work that I have been able to find deals solely with matters of form, and in particular with its new engagement with counterpoint.Footnote ⁴¹

So there is a choice: in the blue corner, a tortured soul; in the red corner, some interesting formal features. Obviously enough, the listening public clamours for the tortured soul, so Shostakovich's String Quartet no. 8 is considered such a significant cultural document that it must be studied by British schoolchildren, while Hindemith's op. 32 is perched on the brink of internet oblivion, with only a couple of recordings on YouTube and no more than (at the time of writing) 3,000 hits. And yet, after all that, audiences familiar with Shostakovich are still likely to hear the Hindemith as Shostakovich, even though science has confirmed that there is no tortured soul in the Hindemith. Although it is both amusing and instructive to see how biographical hype can determine the perceived value of a piece in the most extreme manner, the comparison may also be used to help readers see something that should be obvious but which our musicological categories have obscured so thoroughly: that Shostakovich is one of the major neoclassical composers of the twentieth century, sitting alongside Stravinsky, Hindemith and Les Six. Shostakovich's default musical materials were neoclassical, revealing themselves even in the midst of his most expressionist works, like the Fourth Symphony. He fills these materials with new meanings, and it is worth tracing the neoclassical impulse throughout his long career, up to the almost postmodern polystylism of his Fifteenth Symphony.

My second example comes from my recent research on Prokofiev's French period, which is usually overshadowed by what happened next in his biography, that is, by his return to the Soviet Union. The traditions of Russian historiography obviously treat this as some kind of transitional, marginal period, and in Stalin-period writings it was an outright embarrassment. But Western scholars of the French musical scene also tend either to expunge Prokofiev from the record or (if they acknowledge his presence) to treat his work with indifference. I am glad that Jane Fulcher mentioned Prokofiev twice in her book The Composer as Intellectual, but out of three dates she gives for important premières, two are incorrect.Footnote ⁴² I ask you to ponder this: here we have a composer whose premières were regularly attended by Ravel, Stravinsky, Poulenc, Milhaud, Roussel and the rest of the Paris musical beau monde; who routinely received admiring reviews from French composers and critics in the press; and who spent a decade working in Paris. Is it really credible that such a composer would leave no trace worth mentioning in a history of twentieth-century French music, or indeed in a history of twentieth-century Western music?Footnote ⁴³ Yet he is usually not even a token presence in monographs on French composers, with the exception of a recent volume on Poulenc by Hervé Lacombe, who traces Poulenc's fascination with Prokofiev back to 1917, when Prokofiev was still unknown outside Russia but the scores of explosive piano pieces such as the Sarcasms, op. 17, and the Suggestion diabolique, op. 4, reached Poulenc via Ricardo Viñes.Footnote ⁴⁴

There is a story to be told about the attraction of Prokofiev's Third Piano Concerto, played in his unsentimental percussive style. As a successful commercial enterprise, this prompted Stravinsky to write and perform his own, while its topics and textures influenced Roussel's Piano Concerto and Ravel's G major Concerto.Footnote ⁴⁵ Prokofiev's Third Concerto in particular proved to be a moment of revelation for Poulenc, moving him to extol the virtues of a C major triad over the plague of atonality.Footnote ⁴⁶ Outside France, Britten's Piano Concerto and Rawsthorne's First Piano Concerto are deserving of mention, as are, of course, many works by Kabalevsky, Shostakovich and other Soviet composers who were strongly influenced by Prokofiev.

Out of this accumulation of such microhistories which cut across established narratives, I see an inclusive history emerging – more likely to assemble itself in piecemeal fashion than in a weighty compendium by a single scholar. Yet my worry is that these efforts may prove to be at odds with their times. In conclusion, I am going to touch upon a complex and painful issue, particularly difficult to discuss because we have as yet no historical perspective from which to view it in a detached way. I am talking about what has been named ‘the new cold war’ or ‘cold war II’. We have recently seen the swift deterioration of relations between Russia and the West, and we can now add to this the emerging divisions within Europe, prompted both by the banks and by the refugee crisis. How does this new situation affect what we do, including the cluster of issues I have discussed earlier?

Writings on Soviet music have never been free of politics. Take the attitudes of Nicholas Nabokov, which were hostile before and after the Second World War, but significantly softened during the war – all in pace with the changes in official propaganda. The great progress of Soviet music studies in the past 25 years was mainly due to the removal of ideological barriers, the opening of the archives and active exchange and collaboration between post-Soviet and Western scholars. The financial crisis of 2008, which severely shook general faith in capitalism, revived interest both in Karl Marx and in communist alternatives; this is invoked by Harper-Scott in his preface to justify his proposal for a ‘communist musicology’.Footnote ⁴⁷ More recent events, however, have had the reverse effect: Russia is presented in the West as sliding ‘back into the USSR’, and the military muscle-flexing between NATO and Russia reminds us of the dangerous times when both sides trained children how to hide from a nuclear attack. For me, at least, the experience of researching aspects of the Soviet Union differs greatly depending on whether it is generally regarded as firmly in the past or as part of the present. There is a certain paradox in the writings of contemporary Russianists, who are still in the habit of presenting themselves as the destroyers of various cold-war paradigms when at the same time these very paradigms are resurfacing in the public consciousness.

I will give you a couple of recent examples of such resurgence. One is an advertisement for the company Interactive Brokers, which begins with a scene in a restaurant: ‘Did you hear about the NATO plane downed by Russia?’ The point of the ad is that even when the world is on the brink of war and the markets are in turmoil, one can still trade shares from one's mobile phone during an elegant and serene dinner.Footnote ⁴⁸ Every time this came on the CNN channel it made me jump, as it was presumably designed to do.

Now let us take a look at the Penguin advertisement that graced the walls of the Tube in June 2016. ‘Aristocracy, liberalism, progress, principles … useless words! A Russian doesn't need them.’Footnote ⁴⁹ This was an out-of-context quotation from Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, unattributed of course, since people would then have been capable of finding out about the original through a quick web search. Even the Penguin website offered no clues. The character who utters these words is a nihilist, and the novel shows how his ideas cannot be sustained against reality, although only in death can he finally admit this. Attributing such an idea to Turgenev would show a fundamental inability to grasp how literature works, but the Penguin ad would seem, still more crassly, to invite passers-by to attribute them to Russians in general – not a very promising start to a literary marketing campaign. My compatriots in London were offended, but even I – slow to take offence and accustomed to the tradition of mystifying British ads – saw it as a clear cold-war gesture. I was surprised, then, to find that most of my British friends were unable to see that there might be even the slightest problem with such an advertisement. This, to me, was grist to the mill, showing again how easy it was for the cold-war mentality to make a resurgence, and how intellectuals could be oblivious to this danger.

The revival of cold-war rhetoric in the media often presents today's Russia as if it were the Soviet Union, and in particular the Soviet Union of Stalin. This is how it is commonly identified both from outside and from the inside. Culturally, it often seems that Russia is caught in the trap of the ‘post-Soviet’ condition, defining itself constantly in relation to the USSR, whether positively or negatively. But the cultural scholar Alexander Etkind points out that memory is not history, and continues: ‘There is no resemblance between Putinism and Stalinism and there is no continuity, either.’Footnote ⁵⁰ A number of oppositions should give us a rough guide to how these two countries differ:

Thus, Russia is not the USSR and viewing it through the distorting lens of history is wrong. Even in Chatham House, at the very centre of the British political establishment, the researcher Andrew Monaghan suggests that this is a dangerous error:

And indeed, we see in the Western media today the prevalence of clichés and stereotypes about Russia, coupled with a profound lack of interest in the Ukraine crisis – the scant reporting has been devoid of any deep analysis or coherence. We see also a certain Denkverbot, where particular shades of debate become taboo and anyone who deviates from the standard description of Russia as ‘the evil empire’ becomes a ‘Russia apologist’ or ‘Putin's useful idiot’ (astonishingly, such labels have been attached to figures as politically distant from each other as Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn).Footnote ⁵² Russia has been blamed for Brexit, the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency, and for almost any cyber attack, hacking or internet leak.Footnote ⁵³ It has become a useful bogeyman for any government politician wishing to deflect blame for internal problems. The Russian media, of course, indulge in anti-Western propaganda on a daily basis, varying its intensity according to the current level of geopolitical tension. Cold-war stereotypes have once again taken hold among large swathes of the population.

How is this relevant to us, as scholars in the humanities? Those who work in Russian studies have noted that the resurgence of Russia on the world stage, even when accompanied by negative press, has led to an increase of interest from potential applicants. There is now a tentative upward trend in numbers, or at least a halt to the steep decline in the funding of Russian programmes (and interest in them) that took place during the 1990s.Footnote ⁵⁴ Nevertheless, traditional courses that have focused on language, literature and culture are inappropriate to the needs of students whose main interests lie in social and political matters. And the perception of Russia as a more hostile and potentially dangerous country reduces the desirability of a ‘year abroad’ there or, in fact, any kind of fieldwork or language-learning trip.Footnote ⁵⁵

Visas have been more difficult to procure on both sides of the divide, especially since Russia now forbids research access to those arriving on tourist visas. Contacts between scholars have been detrimentally affected by the economic crisis in Russia: scholars over there often find it too expensive to travel abroad to conferences or to hire in scholars from the West. Without such regular personal contacts, which are the ultimate remedy against stereotypes and dogma, scholars on both sides become more susceptible to propaganda. My first monograph, Russian Music and Nationalism,Footnote ⁵⁶ received a very belated Russian review that was written in an ‘Us versus Them’ mode; if the review had been written only five years earlier, both the wholesale rejection of the ‘Western’ view and the mocking tone would have been most unlikely to occur.Footnote ⁵⁷ The reviewer did not have access to the actual book she was reviewing, but took delight in calling me a ‘former compatriot’. As time goes on and the relations between Russia and the West continue to deteriorate, the rhetoric of reviewers hardens further. Here is one of the more extreme examples, from Alexander Belonenko's review of Taruskin's Oxford History of Western Music. It has to be said that the review, taken as a whole, is an expansive and attentive reading that is largely complimentary. In closing, however, Belonenko evidently felt the need for a coup de théâtre, even at the cost of contradicting some of his earlier points:

The accusations that Belonenko levelled at Taruskin reminded me of the rough treatment Laurel Fay received during the most acrimonious period of the ‘Shostakovich Wars’. Because she was working for Schirmer, Fay had an indirect connection to the Soviet Authors’ Rights Agency (VAAP). This was the implausible basis for accusations that she was taking her cues straight from the KGB in a conspiracy to discredit Testimony.Footnote ⁵⁹ Apart from the fact that no evidence was produced, the whole story pointed to a fundamental misunderstanding of how these institutions interacted. In a similar manner, Belonenko fundamentally misunderstood (or mischaracterized) how academic books are produced in the West. And we thought that the times for such rhetorical manoeuvres had passed.

What can we do? We have to be vigilant and avoid resorting to the clichés that replace independent thought. We have to resist the tide of divisive rhetoric in the media and offer our own scholarly perspectives and nuanced narratives. And we have to recognize the need to protect our community of scholars across borders. The dangers facing the arts and humanities in our neo-liberal world are the same whether we are in Russia, the UK or the US. I was struck that in the autumn of 2014 there was a spate of casual humanities-bashing appearing alike on both sides of the new cold-war divide. In January, Barack Obama casually suggested that an art-history degree will get you less money than no degree at all.Footnote ⁶⁰ In September, the Russian culture minister Vladimir Medinsky complained that Russia was overwhelmed by humanities graduates.Footnote ⁶¹ Two months later, Nicky Morgan, then Education Secretary in the UK, warned that studying arts subjects at school would hamper pupils’ prospects for life.Footnote ⁶² As the Russian government began a ruthless cull of humanities jobs in its higher-education institutions,Footnote ⁶³ the Finnish government closed down its world-famous musicology department at Helsinki University (not for any lack of money),Footnote ⁶⁴ while the US continued its policy of casualizing labour in academia, keeping the ever-growing army of adjuncts on the brink of poverty.Footnote ⁶⁵ Unlike the first cold-war era, the spectre of Communism is not haunting the West any more, and there is no longer the international rivalry between blocs that once helped to restrain tendencies towards inequality in the capitalist world. Today, the lines dividing our world are drawn differently, and we should recognize this and respond to this new situation.