This excellent book fills an important void in the diverse and growing body of literature on Stalinist culture. There are numerous valuable studies of major cultural figures, specific works, artistic trends, and Stalin’s personal interventions, but Tomoff’s is the first institutional history of a “creative union.” One would have expected that the Writers’ Union would be the first to get its history as the oldest and best known of these organizations, and also the one that served as a model for all others. But although V. Antipina’s recent book on the everyday life of Soviet writers under Stalin matches Tomoff’s work in the richness of social detail,^[1] it does not deal with the Writers’ Union as a professional organization, a representative of the profession before the state, and an intermediary between the party leadership and the artistic world. It is this approach that makes Tomoff’s book a pioneering effort.
Based on diligent, exhaustive archival research in Moscow, this study also develops a sophisticated conceptual apparatus. Tomoff’s main argument is that, although the general reader thinks of Stalinism and music as a one-way, repressive relationship (illustrated by the well-known ideological campaigns against Shostakovich, Muradeli’s opera The Great Friendship, etc.), as a profession Soviet composers were successful in building their prestige and authority. Compared to literature and cinema, “music was especially difficult for politicians and bureaucrats to control because of its inherently abstract nature” (P. 4). Their monopoly of musical expertise did not allow composers and musicologists any “autonomy” in Stalinist society, but it served as the basis for their professional agency (P. 213). Put simply, they were the only ones who could compose music and interpret it; the Soviet leadership could ban a musical work, but relied on professionals in fleshing out its vague and often ignorant criticisms. By the end of the Stalin period, the Composers’ Union had developed into a powerful professional organization, which had clearly won its power struggle with the Committee on Artistic Affairs (the predecessor of the Ministry of Culture) and established its domination of the Soviet musical world. Within the Union, “a few elite professionals had extraordinary agency to determine the criteria of musical value and hierarchies of status, prestige, and privilege” (P. 301). Yet, the consolidation of professional authority did not mean liberation from party control. The Union’s institutional centralization was distinctly Stalinist in nature, and its leadership mobilized the composers for the production of good, but Soviet, music.
The early chapters of Tomoff’s book provide a dense institutional history of the Union’s genesis in 1939, its funding, structure, and functions. Some characteristics of the Union stand out as reflecting the Stalinist concept of culture management. First, unlike the pre-revolutionary Imperial Russian Musical Society, the Composers’ Union did not accept performers and music teachers – a conceptual division between head- and handwork, but also a reflection of the paternalistic belief that composers and musicologists needed to be provided for, while performers could earn their living by playing music. In 1943, a group of famous performers led by the violinist David Oistrakh vainly petitioned the authorities to merge the Composers’ Union into a Musician’s Union. Second, from the very beginning the leadership of the Union consisted of famous composers rather than administrators with a professional education. The first head of the Composers’ Union was Reinhold Glier, although his deputy Aram Khachaturian was really running the show. After the campaign of 1948, Tikhon Khrennikov became the Union’s general secretary and in this position he lasted an incredible forty-three years, right until the Soviet collapse. Greats, such as Shostakovich and Prokofiev, could be in and out of the Secretariat, but their professional authority within the Union remained impressive even in those times when they fell out of favor with the party leadership. Third, the Union included authors of popular songs – important in Stalinist mass culture – even though this created tensions within the organization, in which professional authority still depended on mastery rather than popularity. During the ideological campaigns of the late 1940s, the authors of mass songs would prove more reliable “party types” than their comrades composing highbrow music.
Tomoff argues that World War Two was a defining moment in the history of the Composers’ Union. War songs played a major role in mobilizing the population for its heroic efforts, while Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony was the first Soviet musical work to achieve international recognition. As recognition of their services, at the war’s end the composers “earned an elite place in a newly recodified hierarchical system of privilege” (P. 89). Special stores, housing privileges, and an exclusive restaurant located in the Central House of Composers marked the Union’s members as belonging to the Soviet elite.
But no less a defining moment was the Zhdanovshchina period in music, which Tomoff reconstructs in unprecedented detail. In contrast to the traditional interpretation presenting the 1948 campaign against composers as the logical extension of the 1946 attacks on writers and playwrights, the author emphasizes factors peculiar to the musical world, such as infighting between populist songwriters and highbrow composers, as well as institutional wrangling for control over musical life between the Committee on Artistic Affairs and the apparatus of the party’s Central Committee. Tomoff shows that once the campaign started party functionaries struggled to formulate their criticism. Thus, Zhdanov complained that the orchestration of Muradeli’s The Great Friendship left some instruments idle for significant parts of the opera, whereas the ideal would be for all instruments to play constantly for its entire duration (P. 134, note 39). Shepilov decried Soviet composers’ infatuation with “inaccessible” symphonic music as opposed to “democratic” opera – democratic in the sense of having a decipherable text that could be checked by party ideologues and heard by listeners (P. 133). Significantly, although the drafts of the party 1948 resolution on music included specific recommendations to end the creation of textless or nonprogrammatic symphonic music and to base other musical genres on the folk tradition, the final text was much more open-ended: “[C]omposers were reminded that their task was to serve the tastes of the people, but they were not given specific instructions about which genres would fit this task” (P. 141). Meanwhile, backstage at the First Congress of Soviet Composers in April 1948, there was considerable “whispering support” for the disciplined composers.
The Composers’ Union weathered the campaign against “cosmopolitans” in 1949 very well, notwithstanding or, perhaps, because of the large proportion of Jews in its ranks: “In case after case, cosmopolitans were disciplined, shamed, and often lost their jobs, but they always retained membership in the Composers’ Union” (P. 166). Attempts to increase the proportion of ethnic Russians and decrease that of Jews in the Union were quietly abandoned even before the campaign’s end – apparently, musical excellence still mattered more within the profession.
One of the most interesting and persuasive parts of Tomoff’s argument refers to the work of the Stalin Prize Committee – “an essential interface between those who wielded political power and those who held intellectual and artistic authority in Soviet society” (P. 246). On the one hand, the party leadership used the authority-granting power of the award to promote the people and works it considered useful. On the other hand, the Composers’ Union nomination and support from the famous composers serving on the committee – reflective of professional recognition – were decisive in the overwhelming majority of cases. Neither side cared much about the nominee’s popular success with a mass audience.
One aspect of Tomoff’s argument that could be conceptualized more subtly is his oft-repeated claim that the Composers’ Union strove to maintain “the boundary between politics and professional life” (P. 189; similar statements are made on Pp. 215 and 300). Such an idea seems natural if one thinks of the Soviet musical profession by comparison with its Western counterpart. But it is difficult to imagine the Union’s leaders “protecting” Soviet musical life from Stalinist politics or the party bureaucracy tolerating this. Tomoff’s material, including the 1947 Ogolevets affair (an ambiguous and exceptional event presented to the reader as the main proof of this “boundary”), would also support an interpretation in which the demarcation line is blurred. If anything, the culture and politics of Stalin’s time were infused with each other and existed in symbiosis. The Soviet leadership saw culture as part of its revolutionary project, and composers not as neutral professionals but as Soviet people, who should write Soviet music because their inner beliefs coincided with the state ideology. Like all cultural production under Stalin, writing music involved making political choices, and most of the time the majority of composers were making the “right choices.” Towards the end of his book, Tomoff provides a much better description of what the Soviet musical professionals were doing, namely “negotiating the overlap between music and politics” (P. 280).
Tomoff’s book is remarkably well researched, with every minute detail of the composers’ everyday life and work duly clarified and placed in its proper context. Given that most Stalin prizes went to opera composers and singers, and that Leonid Utesov petitioned in vain to have estrada (variety) music seriously considered for this award, it is somehow subconsciously fitting that the only time Tomoff confesses his inability to identify musicians is when a party document mentions (with disapproval) [Petr] Leshchenko and [Vadim] Kozin (P. 158, note 19). The irony here, of course, is that an ordinary Soviet person living under Stalin would recognize these names much more easily than those of the composers Tomoff studies, with the possible exception of Dunaevsky. But the consumption of music, whether serious or popular, is not part of what Tomoff aims to analyze in his monograph.
Overall, this is an excellent and innovative book that explains many intricate facts related to the functioning of Stalinist culture. It will be read widely by historians of the Soviet Union and historians of music. One would hope that similar studies of the Writers’ Union, the Artists’ Union, etc. will follow in the wake of Tomoff’s trailblazer.