The awful calamity of Stalin being a music lover

At around 9 p.m. on 5 March 1953 Sergei Prokofiev died of a brain haemorrhage on the sofa of his Moscow flat. He was 61, and had struggled for years with ill health. He had long complained of pain in his soul. Less than an hour later, the source of that pain, Joseph Stalin, died of a heart attack in his dacha on the outskirts of Moscow.

Prokofiev’s death wasn’t so much forgotten as ignored. The leading music magazine Sovetskaya muzyka devoted the first 115 pages of its new issue to Stalin; only then did it mention Prokofiev. A million people thronged the streets to see Stalin lie in state; only 15 attended Prokofiev’s funeral. A string quartet played beside Stalin’s bier. Its violinist, Veronika Rostropovich, cried inconsolably. ‘Leave me in peace,’ she told her colleagues. ‘I’m not crying for Stalin but for Prokofiev.’

Stalin’s shadow also looms over The Sound of Utopia, Michel Krielaars’s vivid, thoughtful exploration of the plight of composers, musicians and performers under his rule. Stalin was a music lover. He listened to every new classical recording, writing one of three verdicts on the sleeve: ‘good’, ‘average’ or ‘rubbish’. When the singer Vadim Kozin performed at the Kremlin, Stalin joined him on stage for folk songs. But such favour meant nothing: Kozin was arrested in 1944 for homosexuality and became one of the two million prisoners sent to the Kolyma labour camps in the Russian far east.

Krielaars, a Russophile Dutch journalist, has profiled ten artists to illustrate the challenges they faced in their fight for professional and physical survival. Alongside big names such as Prokofiev we also get Kozin, little known in the West, and Klavdiya Shulzenko, ‘the Russian Vera Lynn’, whose ‘The Blue Scarf’ was the defining patriotic song of the Red Army in the second world war.