Soviet Music as National Achievement: The Development of Professional Music in the Tatar ASSR, 1928–59

In the summer of 1945, a stream of letters from the director of the recently opened Kazan State Conservatory arrived at various military posts across the Soviet Union.¹ These letters requested the demobilization of numerous soldiers whom the director Nazib Zhiganov felt could positively contribute to the conservatory as both staff and students. In one of these letters, Zhiganov asserted that the request for demobilization was linked specifically to the “question of the consolidation of Tatar national cadres.”² These personnel requests coincided with a similar set of letters in which Zhiganov petitioned material support from various organizations and institutions, including the Leningrad State Conservatory. This flurry of activity culminated in the first day of classes on 10 October 1945, a mere six months after the Council of People’s Commissars had officially ordered the opening of an institution of musical higher education in Kazan.³ In its first academic year, the conservatory advanced 65 students, of whom 25 were Tatar, 25 Russian, and 15 of other nationalities, mostly from neighboring autonomous republics.⁴ With the support of Moscow, Tatar bureaucrats were given the authority to re-make Kazan as a center of cultural—in this case musical—gravity in the Volga region.

This article argues for a reassessment of our narrative of Soviet nationalities policy in general and about the relationship between the Soviet state and Tatars in particular. Utilizing a case study, it explores how a group of Tatar composers and musicians who survived the Great Terror became trusted partners in Soviet statecraft, particularly in terms of their leadership role in cultural policies in the Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (TASSR). Focusing on a 30-year period from the end of the 1920s through the end of the 1950s, I assert that Soviet efforts to culturally consolidate Soviet society manifested themselves in substantial nation-building policies in the country’s minority republics that had long-lasting effects on minority cultures. My argument builds on recent works that have questioned, from the perspective of the republics, the efficacy of the 1920s policy of korenizatsiia, and focuses instead on the nature and consequences of Soviet nationalities policy in the next three decades.⁵ In the case of the Tatar republic, it is clear that substantive efforts at musical nation building began only in the 1930s. Moreover, although the professionalization of Tatar music was envisioned and initiated by Moscow, it resulted in the empowerment of Tatars who, in turn, made the consolidation of Tatar national culture the central pillar of Soviet cultural policy in the republic.⁶ Specifically, Tatar artists, with the support of Moscow, utilized Soviet cultural forms to produce national content, and in their minds tied together socialist construction and nation building as symbiotic processes.⁷

In exploring these complex developments, this article focuses on the life and career of Nazib Zhiganov, one of the most well-known and well-regarded (both officially and by his peers) Soviet Tatar composers. Born in Ural´sk in 1911, Zhiganov was the first Soviet Tatar composer to graduate from the Moscow State Conservatory, the founding head of the Tatar Composers’ Union and the Kazan State Conservatory, and the central figure in the formation of professional Tatar music until his death in 1988. Zhiganov argued for the legitimacy of the adaptation of Tatar folk music to official socialist forms, and his decades-long leadership of the union and the conservatory illustrates the extent to which his methods and goals were in line with Moscow’s directives. Examining his life and work in the musical world of Soviet Kazan demonstrates the significance of the strategies he and others employed to steer Tatar cultural content into conversation with Soviet cultural forms.

Zhiganov’s emergence as a topic of sustained inquiry and interest, beginning in 1996, speaks to the nature of national narratives in contemporary Tatarstan and should be integrated into academic approaches to studying Tatar and Soviet history.⁸ Much of this literature has tended to avoid concrete discussion of the impact of Soviet ideology on administrative pressures...