Music has charms to soothe a savage breast
Simon Sebag Montefiore
SHOSTAKOVICH AND STALIN: THE EXTRAORDINARY RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE GREAT COMPOSER AND THE BRUTAL DICTATOR by Solomon Volkov Little, Brown, £14.99, pp. 370, ISBN 0316861413 COLD PEACE: STALIN AND THE SOVIET RULING CIRCLE
1945-1953
by Yoram Gorlizki and Oleg Khlevniuk OUP, £25, pp. 243, ISBN 0195165810 0 n 16 March 1949. the telephone of the Soviet composer, Dmitri Shostakovich, started to ring and when he picked it up he was told that Comrade Stalin was on the line. He thought it was a prank. After all, he was now out of fashion and favour, the target of Stalin and his henchman Andrei Zhdanov's cultural crackdown as the Cold War escalated causing the dictator to repress freedom and reinforce his iron control. The composer had met Stalin in 1943 when he had advised on the creation of the new Soviet anthem so when he heard the voice, he recognised it and realised no one would dare play such a joke.
Stalin was calling because Shostakovich had refused to go to America to promote a regime that was crushing him and his art. He cited his health as his excuse. Stalin gently asked him about the trip and his health at which Shostakovich retorted bravely he could not go to America because his music was banned in Russia. Stalin pretended innocence: 'What do you mean they don't play it?' He promised he would play it — and have it unbanned. Then he asked about the composer's health: 'I'm nauseated,' replied Shostakovich. Stalin promised medical care and ended the call. The doctors from the Kremlin Clinic arrived soon afterwards and Stalin kept his promise of un-banning Shostakovich's works. But in return. Stalin insisted that Shostakovich had to go to America, and go he did. It was just another priceless moment in their 20-year duel of i art and power.
This is the time — the dark post-second world war world of the Stalinist political and artistic elite — where these two wonderful books interlock. The first is about the extraordinary rollercoaster relationship between Stalin and Shostakovich from the Thirties when the composer rose to fame. On a wider scale, it is about dictators and artists everywhere from Ovid to Pushkin and on to today.
Solomon Volkov is the musicologist and writer who controversially published his conversations with the composer, which revealed his secret disdain for Stalin and the system, setting off vicious attacks on Volkov himself for tainting a Soviet hero. Now he has produced this gripping and colourful anatomy of a relationship between two of the colossi of the 20th century that is both a compelling read and an important service to historians. Volkov is always aware of the wider significance and as a result there are often annoying digressions, meanclerings, and reflections on historical examples — particularly about Pushkin and his autocratic censor Nicholas I on whom Volkov claims that Stalin based himself. Stalin certainly was well aware of that precedent. More interestingly, Stalin adored music, loved to sing and found great overtures settled his soul when not much else did. Equally, he respected artistic genius but that did not stop him overseeing the death of that 'genius' (in his words) poet Mandelstarn and many other talents such as Isaac Babel.
Everything was political to Stalin and art was subservient to that. When it suited him, he denounced and ruined Shostakovich — for example in 1936 Stalin stormed out of his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and himself dictated the headline: 'Muddle instead of Music.' In the second world war, on the other hand, Stalin was happy to use Shostakovich's 7th Symphony to bolster the resistance in Leningrad or help with his new Soviet anthem only to dispense with his services again during Zhdanov's campaign — and then came the phone call ...
The other two famous phone calls made by Stalin to brilliant Russian artists were to the poet Pasternak and the novelist Bulgakov — and Shostakovich was the third. There were actually plenty of such calls: the writer Ilya Ehrenburg received one as well. Yet Volkov makes a great contribution by illuminating the full story of the call to Shostakovich and by revealing many other hitherto unknown details. Stalin really was Genghiz Khan with a telephone.
Cold Peace is a masterful analysis of high politics around Stalin in the least known period of his autocracy. Dark, grim, subtle, crackling with the electricity of Stalin's seething personality and constant manouvreing, this brilliant book delivers readable narrative history, superb archival research and a splendid analysis of that terrifying character: it destroys myths with the same facility that it unveils new fascinations. This may be laconic in style and short in pages, but it is as important and magisterial for the postwar period as the classic historical works of the Revolution and Terror. This is no surprise since the authors are highly distinguished — Yoram Gorlizki is one of the best of the new British generation of Soviet specialists; the outstanding Oleg Khlevniuk is now the pre-eminent Russian historian of the Stalin period.
Never do they stoop for effect or melodrama but their analysis is always urbane and worldly while utterly at home in the nightmarish world of Stalin's mind and the drab insanity of the high bureaucracy. They show how Stalin created a formal if ever-changing system of ruling which he alone could obstruct whenever he liked by intervention from on high. Anyone else who interfered or made independent decisions would be crushed. Yet he himself was allowed to rule in the most informal way over dinners and Western movie sessions: the authors call this 'patrimonial' rule. He constantly concocted 'cases' against all his magnates but interestingly in only one case in this period did they lead to execution: the Leningrad Case of 1949.
Nonetheless Cold Peace proves how every case, including the Leningrad Affair and the Doctor's Plot, was created and promoted by Stalin himself, not as was formerly believed by his henchmen such as Beria, Malenkov or Khnishchev. Yet the book dismisses the myths that Stalin murdered his heir apparent Zhdanov or that Stalin himself was murdered, In this tour de force, the authors have cast light on the most mysterious years of Stalin's rule and made them their own.
Simon Sebag Montefiore's Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar is published by Weidenfeld & Aiieolson.
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