[1] Nedelya, April 1988.[2] Guardian, 4th June 1990.
[3] Stephen G. Wheatcroft, "More light on the scale of repression and excess mortality in the Soviet Union in the 1930s" in J. Arch Getty and Roberta T. Manning, Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 275-290.
[4] Alec Nove, "Victims of Stalinism: How many?" in Getty and Manning, op. cit., pp. 261-274.
[5] E.g., Robert Conquest's review of Robert W. Thurston's Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia, 1934-41 in National Review (15th July 1996), pp. 45-48.
[6] Sunday Times, 13th January 1991.
[7] Abbot Gleason, Peter Kenez, and Richard Stites, Bolshevik Culture: experiment and order in the Russian Revolution (Indiana University Press, 1985), p.74. Current estimates of deaths resulting from the Russian Revolution and its aftermath until 1922 are 20-25 million (Richard Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime 1919-24 [Harvill, 1994], p. 509). Added to Klokova's guess, this produces an overall total in the region of Solzhenitsyn's estimates in The Gulag Archipelago of between 50 and 66 million.
[8] See The Gulag Archipelago. The Soviet use of torture, often assumed to have been introduced under Stalin, was in fact established under Lenin during the incumbency of Dzerzhinsky (see George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin's secret police, Clarendon, 1981).
[9] "Mother Courage", 8th March 1998.
[10] Okunyevskaya's contention is supported in all five of the primary source books listed in this article. See, especially, Eugenia Ginzburg's account of life in the Moscow prisons during in Into The Whirlwind.
[11] Sunday Telegraph Review, 21st September 1997.
[12] "Fears" is also, of course, the title of the fourth movement of Shostakovich's Thirteenth Symphony, based on a poem evoking "the Stalinist era when everybody lived in terror of the NKVD and possible arrest" (Kirill Kondrashin quoted in Wilson, Shostakovich: A Life Remembered, p. 357).
[13] See, for example, the chapter "Fear" in Mikhail Heller's Cogs in the Soviet Wheel: The Formation of Soviet Man (Collins Harvill, 1988).
[14] Wilson, op. cit., p. 183.
[15] Not that this necessarily excluded unspoken dissent. Davies records the following peasant "joke": "A peasant went up to Stalin and asked him when socialism would be built. Stalin replied that it would be soon, in two years' time. And the peasant asked, 'So there will be no GPU or other guard?' Stalin said that there would not be. Then the peasant said 'Then we will shoot you all.'" Op. cit., p. 176.
[16] Ibid, pp. 168-82.
[17] See MacDonald, The New Shostakovich, pp. 109-111.
[18] Ibid, p. 176.
[19] See MacDonald, "Naive Anti-Revisionism" in Ho and Feofanov, Shostakovich Reconsidered, Toccata, 1998.
[20] See MacDonald, "Thoughts on David Fanning's Shostakovich Studies", DSCH Journal No. 5 (Summer 1996), p. 17.
[21] E.g., Christopher Norris (ed), Shostakovich: the man and his music, 1982.
[22] This is not to be confused with "revisionism" in general Soviet studies which takes issue with what such revisionists refer to as the ideologically motivated "totalitarian model" they see as propounded by writers like Conquest, Medvedev, and Solzhenitsyn. (See, for example, Getty and Manning, op. cit.)
[23] Richard Taruskin: "A great deal of evidence suggests that in his later years Shostakovich became desperately obsessed with his historical image, and with the theme of self-justification. For he did have a history of collaboration to live down." ("The Opera and the Dictator", New Republic, 200/12, 20th March 1989, p. 35.) Malcolm Hamrick Brown: "As more of Shostakovich's contemporaries speak out and as reliable documentary information becomes available, the 'real' Shostakovich is likely to emerge as both a sometime closet dissident and a sometime collaborator." Notes (March 1993), p. 960; melos 4-5 (Summer 1993), p. 42.
[24] See I. MacDonald, "Universal Because Specific: Arguments for a Contextual Approach" and "Writing About Shostakovich: The Post-Communist Perspective" in Ho and Feofanov, op. cit.
[25] See the contemporary statements of Christopher Norris and Robert Matthew-Walker.
[26] "The Opera and the Dictator: the peculiar martyrdom of Dmitri Shostakovich", New Republic, 200/12, 20th March 1989, pp. 34-40; "A Martyred Opera Reflects Its Abominable Time", New York Times, 6th November 1994, Section 2, pp. 25, 35-36.
[27] "The Composer Was Courageous But Not as Much as in Myth (Shostakovich's From Jewish Folk Poetry was not so much written 'for the drawer' as concealed in a belated panic)." The New York Times, 14th April 1996, Section 2, pp. 27, 32.
[28] Wilson herself, throughout her commentary, explicitly accepts that the composer hated Stalinism and communism (e.g, p. 333).
[29] Irina Kustodieva, Yuri Tyulin, Sofiya Shostakovich, Maximilian Steinberg, Olga Lamm, Lydia Zhukova, Nathan Perelman, Irina Derzayeva, Nikolai Sokolov, Tatyana Glivenko, Alexander Gauk, Tatyana Vecheslava, Galina Serebryakova, Nadezhda Welter, Arnold Ferkelman, Mikhail Tsekhanovsky, Alisa Shebalina, Grigori Fried, Nikolai Sokolov, Ilya Slonim, Mikhail Meyerovich, Alexei Ikonnikov, Yuri Levitin, Nina Dorliak, Nicholas Nabokov, Valentin Berlinsky, Lyubov' Rudneva, Tatyana Nikolayeva, Oleg Prokofiev, Mariya Konniskaya, Evgeny Yevtushenko, Robert Craft, Sergei Slonimsky, Boris Pokrovsky, Peter Pears, Rudolf Barshai, Mark Lubotsky, Vladimir Ovcharek, Gennadi Rozhdestvensky, Sofiya Vakman, Evgeny Shenderovich, Krzysztof Meyer.
[30] "The Problem of Shostakovich", Commentary (February 1995), pp. 46-9.
[31] On the subject of whether Shostakovich witnessed Lenin arrive at the Finland Station, Zoya confirms this, recording that her brother was "in raptures", adding in mitigation: "Well, he was only a young boy of ten". Boris Lossky regards this story as extremely unlikely, calling it "sheer invention by the guardians of this Soviet composer's 'ideological purity'" (op. cit., p. 20). Lev Lebedinsky confirms the story with the twist that Shostakovich added: "I knew a dictator was arriving." (ibid., p. 335). There is no reason to suppose that, whether true or false, this event reflected anything serious about the young Dmitri's political beliefs, inasmuch as the only witnesses we have to these regard them as non-existent.
[32] 5th January 1918. Galli-Shohat puts the actual date of composition of the March a year earlier: spring 1917.
[33] I.e., the "'old' people", thus despised by communists as obsolete wishywashy liberal humanitarians.
[34] A Certain Art, p. 186.
[35] 26th April 1924, 3rd June 1924.
[36] Wilson, op. cit., pp. 89-91.
[37] E.g., The Nose, The Golden Age, and The Bolt.
[38] Among many thousands of intelligenty liquidated during the early years of the Cultural Revolution was Shostakovich's friend Mikhail Kvadri, dedicatee of the First Symphony, who was shot in 1929.
[39] See MacDonald, "You Must Remember!" in DSCH Journal No. 6 (Winter 1996), pp. 25-7.
[40] Cf. Yakov Milkis (Wilson, op. cit., p. 316) on the C major conclusion of the Eighth Symphony.
[41] See MacDonald, "Naive Anti-Revisionism" in Ho and Feofanov, op. cit.
[42] "In the last years of [Shostakovich's] life we met rarely, and not for long, or accidentally. And once, at such a meeting, Dmitry Dmitriyevich said: 'You know, Flora, I met a wonderful young man - a Leningrad musicologist [he did not tell me his name - F. L.]. This young man knows my music better than I do. Somewhere, he dug everything up, even my juvenilia.' I saw that this thorough study of his music pleased Shostakovich immensely. 'We now meet constantly, and I tell him everything I remember about my works and myself. He writes it down, and at a subsequent meeting I look it over.'"
[43] See Ho and Feofanov, op. cit.; MacDonald, "The Turning Point" in DSCH Journal No. 9 (Summer 1998). It should be noted that Wilson's avowed intent to avoid getting "too involved" in the matter of the authenticity of Volkov's Testimony' did not extend to her editorial decision to include (op. cit., p. 125) Basner's charge that Testimony is "a falsified account" for the reason that it fails to mention the story of Shostakovich's interrogation in 1937. Although Shostakovich did not confide this story to him, Solomon Volkov was aware of it through other channels, but declined to mention it in his editorial commentary on the grounds of its manifest untrustworthiness (personal communication from Volkov).
[44] See MacDonald and Feofanov, "Do Not Judge Me Harshly! Anti-communism in Shostakovich's letters to Isaak Glikman" in DSCH Journal No. 8 (Winter 1997), pp. 11-14.
[45] Shostakovich sardonically described the Eighth Quartet to Glikman as "ideologically unsound and of no utility to anyone" (19th July 1960).
[46] She also quotes the composer's third wife Irina's suggestion (given in a private interview, p. 345) that the finale of the Twelfth Symphony describes "a vision of the ideal ruler inspired by Pushkin's verses addressed to Nicholas I ('In Hope of All the Good and Glory' [1826])". Wilson adds: "In this case, the triumphant major apotheosis of the Finale can perhaps be interpreted as the victory of a much hoped-for utopia." Aside from the improbability of a realist like Shostakovich harbouring utopian ideals (let alone as late as 1961, after 44 years of the failed utopia of communism), Irina's suggestion and EW's interpretation arguably completely misconstrue the tone of the Twelfth's finale. While mingling tragic and satirical impulses in the composer's usual style, the movement, in particular its "triumphant major apotheosis", is clearly predominantly satirical, parodying Soviet triumphalist rhetorical conventions in the same way as Gavriil Popov in the eight-minute "apotheosis" of his Sixth Symphony (1969-70).
[47] Cf. Litvinova (Wilson, op. cit., p. 170) and Meyer (ibid, p. 463).
[48] Mstislav Rostropovich claims once to have found Shostakovich practising his signature upside down. "It's for 'my' articles in the newspapers," he explained." It's so I can sign them when they push them across the table to me without having to turn them round to read them." Classic CD (June 1992), pp. 20.
[49] See MacDonald, "Naive Anti-Revisionism" in Ho and Feofanov, op. cit.
[50] A composer less likely ever to have wished his conductors to sing like nightingales would be difficult to imagine. Aside from Opus 4 No. 2, his music almost entirely lacks "nightingale" qualities (of the sort possessed, for example, by Rachmaninov's music, which Shostakovich disliked). In fact, Shostakovich is arguably more of a "speaking" composer than a "singing" one - hence his veneration of Mussorgsky.
[51] Cf., for example, Flora Litvinova's account of Shostakovich's minutely detailed plan for a musical setting of a passage in Gogol's Dead Souls (Wilson., p. 166).
[52] Just such a programmatic consistency is suggested by the present author in The New Shostakovich.
[53] Statement by Kirill Kondrashin read at a symposium held at Bucknell University, New York, 9th September 1980 (translated by Antonina W. Bouis).
[54] E.g., Classic CD (June 1992), pp. 19-21; BBC Music Magazine (February 1995), pp. 16-20.
[55] Galina: A Russian Story, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984.
[56] Grigoryev and Platek (eds), Dmitri Shostakovich: about himself and his times, Progress, 1981.
[57] Vishnevskaya, op. cit., pp. 399-400.
[58] G. M. Shneyerson (ed), D. D. Shostakovich, Articles and Materials (Shostakovich: Stat'i i materialy), published by Sovietsky Kompozitor, Moscow.
[59] See MacDonald, "Recent Commentary on Symphonies 1-5" in DSCH Journal No. 7 (Summer 1997), pp. 9-10.
[60] "Shostakovich: the public and the private", Daugava (1990, Nos. 3-4).
[61] See MacDonald and Feofanov, op. cit.
[62] Wilson, op. cit., p. 170.
[63] Norris is still arguing that it is immoral to suggest that Shostakovich was not a faithful communist and that it is merely "fashionable" or "de rigueur" to claim as much (BBC Radio 3, 15th February 1998).
[64] Jasper Parrott with Vladimir Ashkenazy, Beyond Frontiers (Collins, 1984), pp. 77-84.
[65] See my reply to Brown in Notes (March 1994), pp. 1208-10. Brown seems to work on the basis that the unsupported assertions of a senior academic should, like the word of a gentleman, be accepted without question. Replying to the fully documented contentions of Allan Ho and Dmitry Feofanov in the AMS (American Musicological Society) email discussion group on 15th October 1997, Brown claimed that nowhere in the writings of himself, Laurel Fay, or Richard Taruskin could be found the assertion that "Shostakovich was Soviet Russia's most loyal musical son". This last statement demonstrates the Brown method in action: make an ex cathedra announcement and hope that no one shows it to be false; in other words, bluff it out. When Ho and Feofanov replied, showing where the phrase in question occurs (twice) in the writings of Richard Taruskin, Brown made no apology, offering only a piece of self-excusing obfuscation. Yet there was no reason for him to have got himself into this pickle in the first place. Had he simply picked up the phone and asked Taruskin if he'd ever used this phrase, the latter could have enlightened him straight away. Nor is this the only example of this sort of thing. Ho and Feofanov further enquired, in connection with Brown's partial reporting of Maxim Shostakovich's views on Testimony, why Brown did not simply ring up Maxim and ask for his views, as they had. Brown has not explained why he did not do this - evidence of another airyfairy ex cathedra pronouncement without foundation. Now that he is being called to account for these and other examples of playing fast and loose with the truth, Brown, a man who has argued as robustly as anyone during this debate, is crying fainites - pleading that he, who accuses Shostakovich of collaborating with the Soviet regime and joining the Party in 1960 for his own advantage, has been a victim of ad hominem personal attacks (DSCH Journal 9 [Summer 1998]). Does he expect to be granted some form of academic immunity whereby he can sit safely in his office airily libeling a great artist without incurring any comeback? It seems so. Indeed, Brown now seeks to represent himself as an aggrieved moderate who does not understand the vehemence with which these matters are disputed. If he genuinely does not understand, he should not participate. If he does understand, he should check his facts before making his "authoritative" claims.
[66] Irina's supposedly dismissive stance on Testimony has been exposed as retrospective and motivated by, among other things, the question of royalties (Ho and Feofanov, "Shostakovich and the Testimony Affair", DSCH Journal 8 [Winter 1997], pp. 43-44). Moreover, with her other hat on, Irina is a signatory to the inaugural declaration of the Shostakovich Foundation (1992), which reads (in part) as follows: "The personality of Shostakovich proved a powerful moral influence on his contemporaries. During the hard and cruel era of Stalinism, he had the courage to express in his music the misery of his people by means of an extraordinary dramatic feeling, and to denounce the hidden forces which were then eliminating millions of human lives. His music became a moral support for all who were persecuted. Belief in the final victory of justice, instilled through his works, transformed his music into a powerful stimulus to the spirit of resistance and freedom... His work, of universal value, is recognised by all."
[67] Tape on file with Allan Ho and Dmitry Feofanov.
[68] New York Times, 14th April 1996, Section 2, p. 32. Cf. MacDonald, "Naive Anti-Revisionism" in Ho and Feofanov, op. cit.; or MacDonald, "Fay Versus Shostakovich: Whose Stupidity?" in East European Jewish Affairs, Vol. 26 No. 2 (Winter 1996), p. 10.
[69] Notes (March 1994), p. 1211.
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