Creative Integrity Despite Oppression: Soviet Realism and Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 >>> Ruthann Elder Many Americans take for granted the freedom of speech protected by our Constitution. It is very common to see in music today, outward protest of the government and its actions. Many would have difficulty imagining a world where that freedom was not guaranteed. However, many important pieces of music grew out of the oppression of speech. Dmitri Shostakovich composed during the height of the Cold War and Soviet power. The Soviet government placed strict limitations on the speech of its people. When it came to music, the Soviets developed a standard called Soviet Realism, which all composers were expected to follow. Two important pieces Shostakovich composed during this time were his opera Lady Macbeth, which premiered in 1934, and Symphony No. 5, which premiered in 1937. He and his colleagues treaded on thin ice when composing music that outwardly criticized or contradicted the Soviet Union’s ideology. Shostakovich himself got into trouble this way and at one time expected the secret police to show up at his door to arrest him. Shostakovich’s life as a composer was a constant struggle between meeting the standard for Soviet Realism and maintaining his own creativity. In Symphony No. 5, Shostakovich achieved his first successful blend of his personal creativity and Soviet Realism. Shostakovich grew up in a very tumultuous time in Russian politics. He was born in 1906 in St. Petersburg, later called Petrograd, and then Leningrad.1 Early in Shostakovich’s life the government underwent much turmoil. In 1917, the Romanov monarchy fell and in 1918, Lenin and the Bolshevik Party took over the new government and dissolved the Constituent Assembly. Opposition to this new Soviet government led to a civil war from 1918 to 1921.2 Shostakovich’s family, however, had the revolutionary background to meet the requirements of Soviet class ideology. His mother had joined the Bolshevik party after the 1905 uprising and his paternal grandfather had been exiled to Siberia for his involvement with the Polish uprising.3 There is not much to suggest that Shostakovich was not a model Soviet citizen at this point. In 1928, Stalin and the Soviet Central Committee began showing more interest in Soviet music. The government had its own ideas of what Soviet art should be and the leaders saw only chaos.4 The Soviet philosophy of art was as follows: Every artist…has the right to create freely according to his ideal, independently of everything. However, we are communists and we must not stand with folded hands and let chaos develop as it pleases. We must systematically guide this process and form its result.5 This “systematic” guidance became known as Soviet Realism.
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