Soviet Music and Society under Lenin and Stalin: The Baton and the Sickle (review)

Western studies of folk, popular, and proletarian (i.e. manufactured popular) music in the Soviet Union have been disappointingly few and far between, especially given the value placed by the apparat on culture created by and for the 'People'. Whatever intrinsic value one ascribes to that culture, it is hard to understand the periodic persecution of Soviet high art without knowing something of the other side of the coin. And Soviet and post-Soviet sources are not always helpful, tainted as they were/are by propaganda and polemic.

Recent moves towards rectifying the situation owe much to the efforts of Neil Edmunds (see his The Soviet Proletarian Music Movement (Oxford, 2000)), and if the new volume edited by him is patchy in its quality, that may in large part be a reflection of the under-developed nature of scholarship in this area as a whole. Edmunds's own introduction is understandably provocative; but his enthusiastic advocacy of 'minor' composers and of demotic music of one kind or another is scarcely vindicated by the essays that follow, which are mainly neutral with respect to artistic quality (though by no means the worse for that).

The value of the book is rather in its snapshots of music's interface with social history, and it may thus find a more grateful readership among social historians than among musicians. Such readers will no doubt appreciate Anna Ferenc's satellite picture of 'Music in the Socialist State', which takes for granted prior acquaintance with the Proletkult movement, the New Economic Policy, and so on, but whose overview of musical history in Lenin and Stalin's Soviet Union barely adds to well-known studies published over the past thirty years. On the other hand, Richard Stites's survey of 'The Ways of Russian Popular Music to 1953' has much to offer readers from both disciplines, even if, as in most of the contributions, the absence of music examples is frustrating.

Notwithstanding Edmunds's preliminary remarks on the limitations of a historiography of Soviet music centred on Shostakovich and Prokofiev, the three essays on those composers are all rewarding, not least because their subject matter crosses boundaries of genre and ideology. Gerard McBurney takes an absorbing look at and behind Shostakovich's 1931 music-hall revue Declared Dead; the film historian John Riley considers the same composer's smash hit (and much recycled) 'Song of the Counterplan', and Lesley-Anne Sayers and Simon Morrison probe the intentions and reception of Prokofiev's Diaghilev ballet The Step of Steel.

Edmunds's own chapter, 'Soviet Musical Propaganda and its Composers during the 1920s', is, as one might expect, a mine of information, not least on the revolutionary motivation and activities of various proletarian-oriented practitioners, while being notably silent on the role of certain of those figures in the persecution of their high-art counterparts. Even more remarkable is the conclusion to Robin LaPasha's 'Folk Music and the Soviet Stage in the 1930s' (the title itself is a misnomer for a study confined to the province of Ivanovo), whose claim that 'one cannot deny [sic] that the Olympiads [competitive festivals for amateurs] were a uniquely empowering ritual of assertion and affirmation for performers (especially peasants) who recently had been denied the legitimacy of their music and culture' is unsupported—indeed it is barely explained—in the essay itself, whose lack of chronological context severely reduces its usefulness.

As usual with such broadly based volumes, contributions focusing on Russia's surrounding Soviet nations and autonomous regions appear at the end. In some ways this is a pity, because it is here that the Soviet attitude to musical culture arguably produced the most dramatic ideological tensions. As elsewhere, folk and popular musics helped to give these nations a voice. But at the same time, centralized support for those musics—generous subsidies for folk ensembles and for the dissemination of information throughout...