The lonely wait of Dmitri Shostakovich

It is not uncommon in reading memoirs of ordinary and even high ranking individuals
in the USSR in the 1930s and 1940s to come across details of how they planned to
deal with the inevitable ‘knock on the door’. Some kept a loaded revolver under the
pillow with one bullet, designed for a swift suicide instead of the torments of the
Lubyanka.

Shostakovich, following his second, post war denunciation, waited patiently for his
arrest, apparently sat on the landing of his apartment block so as not to wake his
family. The catastrophe of the war, and Stalin’s failure to adequately prepare for it,
had left the dictator reliant on talented generals, leaders, politicians and in
Shostakovich’s case, figures whose works could be used for propagandist purposes.

One by one Stalin, by now suffering from a psychotic paranoia, eliminated people
who appeared to have got a bit too big for their boots. Hero of the Red army, Zhukov
came within a whisker of being purged, Molotov’s wife , Polina Zhemchuzhina, was
punished because of her husband’s popularity and Shostakovich felt the icy winds of
public opprobrium blow in his direction for a second time in 1948, he had committed
the mortal sin of attracting world popularity for his seventh Leningrad Symphony.
And yet the knock on the door never came. Shostakovich outlived Stalin; he was one
of the lucky few from a generation of composers, writers and poets who died in the
icy wastes of Kolyma or the Sovoletsky Islands.

The question is why? Shostakovich had fallen out of favour twice. In 1936, the
beginnings of the Great Terror, a campaign of bad reviews and criticism began to
circulate in Pravda, probably at Stalin’s behest, criticizing his music as being too
formalist. The Soviet State loved to find new ‘isms’ to label its enemies with, and in
this case formalism became a catch all term for elitism, a dangerous concept in a
workers state. Stalin, though operating the levers of state power still relied on popular
opinion, he needed to undermine a popular figure like Shostakovich first before he
could move against him.

But was it simply Shostakovich’s popularity that saved him? As other artists found in
the Third Reich, trying to retain some degree of integrity whilst keeping out of trouble
and still staying loyal to the country of their birth, often in spite of its leadership, was
a tricky and ambiguous business. The much disputed and questionable ‘memoirs’ of
Shostakovich, Testimony, dismissed as inauthentic by his widow, children and closest
friends, tells us a story of a man who harbored suppressed anti Soviet thoughts
throughout much of his life, who allegedly said: "Music illuminates a person and
provides him with his last hope; even Stalin, a butcher, knew that, and that was why
he hated music.”

This would make the case of Shostakovich that more remarkable, because Stalin
personally decided the fates of high profile individuals, sparing some, like Boris
Pasternak, and destroying others, such as Osip Mandelstam. To have let Shostakovich
go the first time round may have had something to do with a realisation of the
limitations of his own power, based on an anti elitist populism. To have allowed him
to survive a second round of denunciations in 1948, when Stalin, victorious war
leader, was at the zenith of his power, suggests the composer had some use to the
dictator. Stalin, unlike his German counterpart, had been concerned since the
beginning of his career with the minutiae of administration and was forever
calculating and re-evaluating the uses an individual could serve to him. How far was
Shostakovich actually a loyal and accepting subject to Stalin, willing to place his great
talents in the employ of the Stalinist State?

Shostakovich had been that most hated of things in the 1920s to Stalin, a rising star.
He had managed to encapsulate in his first symphony the boundless and frenetic
energy that had been unleashed by Russian Revolution. Following the Russian Civil
War and the end of War Communism, a feeling of general optimism pervaded
Russian culture. It would have been all but impossible for Shostakovich not to have
reflected the realities of the bleak Stalinist Cultural Revolution in his music, when in
the late 1920s the Stalinist State began to direct all areas of Soviet Cultural life with
rigid proscriptive dogma. When Stalin and his entourage saw a performance of Lady
Macbeth of the Mtensk District, the dictator was furious, the profound sense of
unease, fear and anxiety that had permeated Shostakovich’s world was evident within
the work. Though it had been performed nearly 200 times to rapturous reviews, when
Stalin saw it in 1936, Shostakovich must have known he was in immense danger.
How far did Shostakovich deliberately toe the line in later works, how far did he
actively become a musical laureate for Stalinism? He did shelve his dark and
brooding fourth symphony until 1961, and his fifth and sixth symphonies were
altogether less oppressive, more optimistic and more reflective of the official vision of
Soviet Russia, the Russia of mass industrial dynamism, the five year plans, the White
Sea Canal, tractor farms, power stations and collectivization. No mention here of the
slaves that built them.
To the Russians, the Second World War was the Great Patriotic War. To
Shostakovich, his next three Symphonies, 7th, 8th and 9th were works in the interests of
the struggle for national salvation; Stalin encouraged a level of nationalistic fervour
that the famous seventh symphony encapsulated, played, as it was by a half starved
orchestra and broadcast, defiantly, to the besieging Wehrmacht at the city’s gates.

One of the most vexing aspects of assessing Shostakovich’s relationship with Stalin is
the wild card that is ‘Testimony’. Unfortunately, there are too many inconsistencies
with the author Volkov’s claim that it is based on conversations he had with
Shostokovich for it to be a credible source. Had been more reliable we could be
comforted in the knowledge that the composer was a courageous, silent dissenter,
struggling valiantly under the burden of Stalinist society.
The truth is more ambiguous and it raises questions about the relationship between
artists and tyrants. At different points in his career there are different Shostakovichs,
the optimist, the pessimist, the realist and the patriot, a man who at some periods in
his career managed to survive Stalinism because for all its blood thirstiness, it too
thrived on a degree of populism. His degree of compliance with the State was
probably based to some degree on his belief in the legitimacy of the revolution, he
grew up with parents who sheltered revolutionaries before 1917. But even as the
revolution turned sour, which, let us not forget would have happened for the most part
to individuals at the time in tiny increments, Shostakovich may have echoed his
anxieties in his music, while still hoping for the best, and trying to retain some degree
of faith in the institutions that governed Russia.