The Magical Chorus

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Culture and politics have always been indivisible, and to maintain the contrary is also making a political statement. A stark and tragic example of that connection is Russian culture in the twentieth century: perhaps for the first time in history did such a brutal experiment of politics being forced into the cultural life of such a huge country take place over such a long period, continuing through world wars, convulsive revolutions, and the most ruthless terror.

That is the subject of this book, the first of its kind in any language: while studies in particular areas of cultural-political interrelationships in Russia in the last century are proliferating, there has not been a unified presentation.

The relationship between rulers and culture is a theme that has interested me since my Soviet childhood. My first collection did not consist of the usual toy soldiers or stamps; following Joseph Stalin’s death in March 1953, I clipped newspaper photographs of the late dictator with cultural figures like the writer Maxim Gorky or actors from the Moscow Art Theater. This is how far back the psychological roots of this work go. Later, as a journalist, member of the Union of Soviet Composers and senior editor of its Sovetskaya Muzyka magazine, and interviewer of many leading cultural figures, I continually had to deal with the political aspects of Soviet culture, which at the time seemed vastly urgent to us all. As a witness, I have tried to convey that sense of urgency here.

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