The Sound of Utopia: Musicians in the Time of Stalin by Michel Krielaars. Pushkin, 336 pages

Joseph Stalin was not only a bookworm—his personal library contained some 20,000 volumes—but also a music-lover. In the evenings, at his dacha outside Moscow, the Soviet dictator would listen to every new release of a classical recording before scribbling his verdict on the album sleeve: “good,” “average,” or “rubbish.” The last one could lead to a stint in the gulag or a bullet. Indeed, on the eve of his death in March 1953, Stalin, who had ordered the murder of the famous theater director Solomon Mikhoels in January 1948, was preparing a purge of Jews in the Soviet Union that would have swept up numerous cultural luminaries.

In his sardonically titled The Sound of Utopia, Michel Krielaars, a Dutch journalist who lived in Russia from 2007 to 2012, explores the life and fate of musicians during the Stalin era, ranging from the composer Sergei Prokofiev to the pianist Sviatoslov Richter. His portraits are by turns whimsical, idiosyncratic, and poignant. Drawing upon interviews with the children and grandchildren of Soviet musicians and his own wide reading, Krielaars skillfully illuminates the extreme pressures that Russian musicians experienced during Stalin’s capricious rule, when art and politics, more often than not, formed a bloody crossroads.

One option was accommodation. The great composer Sergei Prokofiev embraced it. Born in 1891, he was a wunderkind who began his studies at the St. Petersburg Conservatory and went on to win acclaim for his first piano concerto, which premiered in 1912. After the Bolsheviks came to power in 1918, Prokofiev, who was something of a dandy, made a beeline for London and Paris, which were teeming with aggrieved Russian exiles who hoped that the Bolshevik regime was a mere interlude.

By the early 1930s, Prokofiev decided to return permanently to the Soviet Union, where he wouldn’t have to compete for public attention with Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Rachmaninoff, both of whom had decided to remain in the West. Krielaars describes him as a “cold, ambitious egotist who did whatever was necessary to ingratiate himself with the communist authorities. In return, he was able to enjoy an extravagant lifestyle and was the darling of the regime—the same regime that had sent his first wife to a labor camp.” When the Central Committee created the Union of Russian Composers and Stalin mandated “socialist realism” as an artistic policy, Prokofiev adapted. Writing in Izvestia, for example, in November 1934, he moved away from modernism, stating that music “must be melodious, but with melody which is simple and comprehensible, without becoming repetitive or trivial.” His superb symphonic suite Lieutenant Kije, which was originally written between 1933 and 1934 as a film score, was written in this spirit.

Prokofiev’s maneuvering did not prevent the regime from banning in 1936 his Cantata for the 20th Anniversary of the October Revolution—a massive work featuring orchestra, military band, accordion band, percussion ensemble, two mixed choirs and a recorded speech—on the grounds that it defamed the revolution and Lenin. It was not performed until three decades later. 

What made life so treacherous was that during the Stalin era, Prokofiev and others never could be sure when or what would incur the wrath of the Kremlin. In January 1936, Stalin attended a performance of Dmitri Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, only to storm out of the performance with his henchmen. A few days later an editorial appeared in Pravda headlined, “Muddle Instead of Music,” accusing Shostakovich of the sin of “formalism” (an all-purpose and meaningless epithet that the Soviet authorities never attempted to define). Shostakovich was never arrested; others were not so fortunate. In 1937 the composer Vsevolod Zaderatsky was arrested and sentenced to six years forced labor in the gulag, where he somehow managed to write the 24 Preludes and Fugues for Piano in a little notebook.

In 1948, the Soviet Central Committee issued a resolution denouncing a variety of composers. A number of celebrated works by Prokofiev were suddenly banned, including his Symphony No. 6 as well as the Piano Sonatas Nos. 6, 7, and 8. “Prokofiev’s demotion in 1948,” Krielaars writes, “had less to do with ideological issues than with the fickleness of policymakers, factions within the bureaucracy and financial crises.” In 1957, four years after his death (he expired on the same day as Stalin), Prokofiev was rehabilitated and awarded the Lenin Prize.

Unlike Prokofiev, Sviatoslov Richter, who was born in 1915, did not grow up in tsarist Russia but experienced the turbulence of the Civil War. He flourished in the hothouse atmosphere of the cosmopolitan seaport Odessa, accompanying violinists, singers, and even a circus as a teenager. He moved to Moscow to study with the legendary teacher and polyglot Heinrich Neuhaus at the Moscow conservatory, who, like Richter, was of German ancestry and was imprisoned for eight months in 1941. That same year Richter’s father, Teofil, was arrested, accused of espionage and shot in August 1941 by Stalin’s NKVD, two months after Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa to invade the Soviet Union, thereby opening up a two-front war that would prove his downfall.

With the death of Stalin, Richter could travel abroad and became a star in the West, renowned for his colossal technique and sensitive interpretations, whether he was playing Bach or Prokofiev (whose music he admired as much as he despised the man himself). The flat in which Richter lived with the singer Nina Dorliak—a purely Platonic relationship, Krielaars reports—has been converted into a memorial museum and concert venue. There Krielaars learned that Richter worshipped Marcel Proust:

“Proust, the gay dandy who shut himself up in his cork-panelled room to devote himself to literature, and whose character Swann kept elitist company but, as a Jew, was the eternal outsider.” Given that being gay was punishable with years in a labor camp, Richter kept his own sexuality a tightly held secret. Krielaars wonders whether the KGB might have tried to blackmail Richter, but provides no evidence that it did.

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The pressures on these artists were intense. When the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich (who later became the much-beloved conductor of the National Symphony) traveled to Paris in 1974, he encountered his friend David Oistrakh, who had barely escaped being nabbed during Stalin’s Great Terror in 1936. Oistrakh told him, “I admire your purity, your courage, everything you do. But tomorrow you will read a letter to Pravda, signed by me, in which I denounce you. I beg you to find the strength to forgive me.”

Then there was the Polish-born composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg, who fled Warsaw for Minsk after the Nazi invasion. During the Second World War, he served as the chairman of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and traveled to America to raise funds for the Soviet war effort. That was enough to bring him into bad odor after the war concluded. Starting in 1948, he and his family were under steady surveillance by the secret police, and in 1953 he was incarcerated in Moscow’s notorious Butyrka prison. After he was informed that he was being released from prison, he apparently told the wardens, “I am a Jewish nationalist and must stay here in prison.” Weinberg spent the rest of his life as a recluse.

Krielaars ends by observing that Russia has come full circle under Vladimir Putin. New attacks on “formalism” are circulating. Artists whose patriotism is deemed inadequate are being persecuted. It’s a fresh instance of what the Soviet-era pianist Maria Yudina, invoking Shakespeare, once publicly denounced as “art made tongue-tied by authority.” In excavating the Soviet Union’s mistreatment of its greatest cultural figures, Krielaars shows that the Stalin era continues to shape contemporary Russia.