Word: stalinize
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Seen close up at the Waldorf in the wake of these events, Shostakovich scarcely looked fit for his assigned role as Stalin's propagandist. He cut a surprisingly frail figure on the dais at the Starlight Roof, where he was seen to light cigarette after cigarette with trembling hands. His face was at the mercy of twitches and tics, his lips were drawn in an unconvincing smile. A translator read his speech for him; it attacked both U.S. warmongers and Igor Stravinsky, and praised the "unheard-of scope and level of development reached by musical culture in the U.S.S.R...
...Seventh Symphony, he says, was planned in his head before the war; the so-called invasion theme, with its fearsomely swelling fortissimo, has nothing to do with the Nazi attack. "I was thinking of other enemies of humanity [namely Stalin and his killers] when 1 composed the theme." His Fifth Symphony, which established Shostakovich's reputation in the Soviet Union, was meant to describe Stalin's Great Terror of 1936-37. In the post-Stalin era, his Thirteenth Symphony was intended as a protest against antiSemitism, and his Fourteenth was an evocation of the horrors of the Gulag...
...Music illuminates a person through and through, and it is also his last hope and final refuge. And even half-mad Stalin, a beast and a butcher, instinctively sensed that about music. That's why he feared and hated...
...Shostakovich, music was indeed the last hope and final refuge of a man perpetually thwarted in the expression of his moral outrage. But the notion that his music's meaning could be made intelligible to Stalin, or to anyone else, was only a comforting illusion. Stalin, like all Russia's other tyrants, held an attitude toward the arts that was best summed up by a bureaucrat in a story by the 19th century satirist Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin: "What I do not understand is dangerous for the state...
...interesting trip, look at the way I'm smiling in the photographs. That was the smile of a condemned man. I felt Like a dead man. I answered all the idiotic questions in a daze, and thought, When I get back it's over for me. Stalin liked leading Americans by the nose that way. Well, why say lead by the nose? That's too strong¬ ly put. He only fooled those who wanted to be fooled. The Americans don't give a damn about us, and in order to live and sleep soundly, they...