Symphony for the City of the Dead

by M. T. Anderson

  On April 7, 1935, Stalin announced that children as young as twelve could be tried and executed as adults. This gave the secret police even more leverage during questioning. Parents who wanted to save the lives of their kids had to provide names of supposed traitors and conspirators. They strained their memories to recall neighbors or coworkers who had made some frustrated comment or cheap joke about the regime. They named names — the Black Marias spread out through the suburbs — and so the net of arrests was spread even wider.

  Meanwhile, undercover officers listening in on conversations across the city reported fearfully that people were speaking more openly about their hatred for the Communist Party. “I am not sorry for Kirov,” said a sailor. “Let them kill Stalin. I will not be sorry for him.” His spite was not unusual.

  So who actually was responsible for Kirov’s murder? An astounding rumor was making the rounds in Leningrad: that the assassination had been ordered by Stalin himself. Recently revealed documents suggest that this is almost certainly true. Members of the Communist Party Central Committee were horrified at the mass destruction wrought by Stalin and his Five-Year Plan. They were muttering about the possibility of Kirov replacing Stalin as general secretary. Comrade Stalin made sure that would not happen.

  Shortly afterward, Kirov’s bodyguard said that he wanted to testify regarding the murder. He knew some information that would shed important light on the case.

  As he was being driven to Leningrad Party Headquarters to speak his secrets, there was an unfortunate car crash. Someone riding with him in the car grabbed the wheel and yanked it to the side. The car careened toward a house, skidded sideways, and smashed into the wall. The bodyguard was killed on impact. Surprisingly, no one else was injured. The bodyguard’s secrets disappeared with him. Was this done deliberately? We will never know: Shortly thereafter, the two secret policemen who had been escorting him were shot. So the case was officially left open.

  Stalin supposedly once said, “To choose one’s victims, to prepare one’s plans minutely, to slake an implacable vengeance, and then to go to bed . . . there is nothing sweeter in the world.”

  Shostakovich felt the accusations creeping toward him. Raya Vasilyeva, the screenwriter of a movie he was working on (Girlfriends), was arrested very publicly in 1935; her name appeared in Pravda on a list of fourteen people who had allegedly planned Kirov’s murder. He was worried he might be implicated next: “Now, you might ask: What does a screenwriter have to do with the composer? And I’ll reply: And what did Raya Vasilyeva have to do with Kirov’s murder? Nothing. But she was shot nevertheless.”

  The arrests continued. After only a few months, some thirty or forty thousand people from Leningrad and its surrounding towns had been exiled to camps in Kazakhstan and Siberia.

  At around the same time, Shostakovich was elected deputy of Leningrad’s October District — a part-time post that demanded he sort out various bureaucratic disputes in the neighborhood. We do not know precisely what he heard or saw in this position — he left no diary, no record of his duties — but he must have seen paperwork that reflected the disappearances, the empty apartments, the children moved to orphanages set up for enemies of the people.

  In the midst of this growing terror, Nina and Dmitri’s young marriage was falling apart. The strain of living with Sofia Shostakovich was wearing on Nina. There were huge fights in the apartment. After arguing with his wife, Shostakovich would flee to the apartment of his poker buddy Zoshchenko, a writer who specialized in stories about cramped communal living. Zoshchenko would keep working while Shostakovich paced anxiously in circles, arguing with himself. Zoshchenko just ignored him. After a while, Shostakovich would thank him for the conversation and leave. The situation was bad.

  As a result of these ruptures, during an international music festival in Leningrad, Shostakovich developed a crush on a young translator and kept writing her desperate letters. He went out to the theater with her on his arm. Nina couldn’t take it any longer. She suggested a separation; eventually they decided on a divorce. While in Moscow for work, Shostakovich started to talk to government officials about getting permission to move there, away from the city of his youth, away from beleaguered Leningrad.

  The divorce from Nina came through.

  Shostakovich returned to Leningrad one last time, to pack his belongings and leave forever.

  When he got there, things evidently didn’t go as he had planned.

  A couple of days later, he telegrammed a friend in Moscow: “Remaining in Leningrad. Nina pregnant. Remarried. Mitya.”

  Still, they clearly couldn’t continue to live with Sofia. The couple started to go through the considerable paperwork to get their own home. As they prepared for their first child, Shostakovich wrote, “There can be no question of a divorce from Nina. I have only now realized and fathomed what a remarkable woman she is, and how precious to me.”

  She was remarkable: physically athletic, intellectually brilliant, and emotionally strong enough to stand up to Mitya. This second marriage between them was an affirmation. It was only at this point that Nina Varzar changed her name officially to Nina Shostakovich. Their marriage was unorthodox — for one thing, she spent each summer up in the mountains of Armenia, studying cosmic rays — but it is clear that their love and support for each other was total.

  Easing their marriage even more, in fall of 1935 word came through that the couple could move into a vacated apartment in a building reserved for Soviet composers. Shostakovich and his pregnant physicist were delighted to move out of his childhood home. Their new apartment was on Kirovsky Prospect — an avenue named after the murdered Kirov.

  This is how things stood when, in January of 1936, Joseph Stalin decided it was time to see what the celebrated Dmitri Shostakovich was all about.

  On the evening of January 26, 1936, Shostakovich was in Moscow on a concert tour, having left his pregnant wife at home in Leningrad. He got a call: Comrade Stalin was going to be attending Lady Macbeth at Moscow’s most famous theater, the Bolshoi. Shostakovich should be there on hand, in case the Great Leader and Teacher wished to call him up to his private box afterward and speak to him about the opera.

  Shostakovich scurried to the theater, “white with fear.”

  When most of the audience was seated, Stalin and his entourage filed in and took their places amid whispers of awe and respect. Stalin sat behind a curtain in a steel-plated opera box designed to repel bullets shot from the orchestra pit. He had a bowl of hard-boiled eggs set next to him to crack and eat at intermission. Clumps of plainclothes guards spread throughout the audience.

  As Shostakovich’s friend the writer Mikhail Bulgakov envisioned the scene, here is what happened next:

  Melik [the conductor] furiously lifts his baton and the overture begins. In anticipation of a medal, and feeling the eyes of the leaders on him, Melik is in a frenzy, leaping about like an imp, chopping the air with his baton, soundlessly singing along with the orchestra. Sweat pours off him. “No problem, I’ll change shirts in the intermission,” he thinks in ecstasy. After the overture, he sends a sidelong glance at the box, expecting applause — nothing. After the first act — the same thing, no impression at all.

  Shostakovich, sitting in the audience, was in torment. In particular, he was furious that the conductor, to make a bigger impression, to make the whole thing louder, had called in extra brass players. The brass section was blaring away right under Stalin’s opera box. Shostakovich looked up to see how Stalin’s entourage was receiving the production.

  Every time the brass and percussion exploded with a new tune, Stalin’s ministers reared back in surprise and turned to look at the hidden Leader behind his curtain. Occasionally, they sneered. Shostakovich was slick with sweat. He sank back in his chair and covered his face with his hand.

  Then — a disaster: Stalin and his aides stood up in the middle of the piece and filed out.

  Supposedly, as Stalin was making his way out of the theater, a reporter asked
him what he thought of Shostakovich’s music. “Eta sumbur,” he growled, “a ne musyka.” —“That’s a mess, not music.”

  No one could pay attention to the second half of the opera.

  Afterward, as Shostakovich and a friend walked through Moscow’s frigid streets, the composer could not stop talking about the social catastrophe. “Tell me, why did they have to over-increase the sound of the [orchestra]? The people in the government box must have been deafened by the brass section.” He grumbled, “I have a feeling that this year, like all leap years, will be a bad one for me.”

  The next day, he left for the next city on his concert tour, Arkhangelsk, “with a sorrowful soul.”

  On January 28, the day of his concert in Arkhangelsk, he stopped at the train station to get a morning paper. The day was cold. The line at the newspaper kiosk was long and slow. When he reached the front, Shostakovich bought a copy of Pravda. He was leafing through it when he spotted an article about him. The headline was “A Mess Instead of Music: About the Opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District.”

  Shostakovich stared in horror at the page. His eye ran down the column. “Coarse, primitive and vulgar . . . bourgeois . . . bestial.” To be criticized in Pravda was a sure sign that a government attack was about to follow. He felt frozen to the spot. He started to shiver. “Nervous, convulsive, and spasmodic . . . fidgety, neurotic.” Someone waiting behind him in the line shouted, “Hey, brother, you already drunk this morning?”

  The unsigned article pronounced:

  From the first minute, the listener is shocked by deliberate dissonance, by a confused stream of sound. . . . The singing on the stage is replaced by shrieks. . . .

  [The composer] scribbles down his music, confusing all the sounds in such a way that his music would reach only the effete “formalists” who had lost all their wholesome taste. He ignored the demand of Soviet culture that all coarseness and savagery be abolished from every corner of Soviet life.

  The article compared Shostakovich to his friend the director Meyerhold and accused them both of complexity, clowning, and having betrayed the people.

  The article threatened: “It is a game of clever ingenuity that may end very badly.”

  This was not just a bad review. It was unsigned, and in Pravda. That meant it was official Party doctrine. Rumor would soon whisper that the article had been written by Stalin himself. This was a catastrophe for Shostakovich. Arrest seemed inevitable.

  The eyes of those in line were on him.

  While (despite claims to the contrary) there is no evidence that Stalin actually wrote “A Mess Instead of Music,” it is certain that he approved it. Why did he want to persecute young Dmitri Shostakovich? Especially after Lady Macbeth had been running for two years, wildly popular, seen as the great hope of Soviet opera? The answer is unclear. It is likely, for one thing, that Shostakovich’s worldwide fame bothered Stalin. It is also possible that Stalin was repelled by the sexual eruptions in Shostakovich’s opera. (One American critic called the opera a “pornophony.”)

  Most important, it seems Stalin wanted to use the example of Shostakovich to scold and worry all of the Soviet Union’s cultural leaders, rebuking them for turning away from “real art, real science, and real literature.” He wanted to assert the infinite power of his regime and to show them that no one was safe.

  A week later, as Shostakovich hurried to Moscow to try to make peace with the government bureaucracy, Pravda fired off a second attack on him, called “Balletic Falsehood.” It tore into Shostakovich’s collective farm ballet, The Bright Stream. It complained that the costumes did not look like the real traditional dress of the Caucasus and that the music was not like real Cossack music. The collective farmers in the ballet were as sweet and false as “painted peasants on the lid of a candy-box.” The article griped, “According to the ballet’s authors, all our difficulties are behind us. Onstage everyone is happy, cheerful, and joyous.”

  Shostakovich was in a bind. Did the Communist Party Central Committee actually want him to depict the realities of life on a collective farm? Of course not: Six million people had died during the famines and uprisings that followed forced collectivization. Depicting that in a ballet would be suicide; it would definitely “end very badly.”

  His opera was condemned for showing a life that was coarse and brutal; at the same time, his ballet was condemned for showing the opposite: an idealized and joyous life. These were, a third article declared, both “lies and falsehood — the formalistic trickery in Lady Macbeth and the sickly sweetness of The Bright Stream.”

  Now Stalin’s regime fired off a series of similar articles using Shostakovich as an example and attacking falsehood and anti-people “formalism” in all the arts: film, architecture, theater, and painting (“On Mess-Making Artists”). Everyone realized that “A Mess Instead of Music” marked a new phase in Stalin’s Great Terror: he had turned his attention to the intellectuals of Leningrad and Moscow.

  Artists, composers, architects, and writers, terrified of being singled out themselves, gathered together and yammered out their agreement with Pravda’s historic pronouncement on Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth. They sent public letters howling at Shostakovich for his “formalist” crimes against art and fell all over themselves to ask what the wise decrees of the Great Leader and Teacher might mean for the other arts — and even the sciences.

  What was this formalism? It literally means music, art, or writing that pays more attention to form and technique than to content. This definition seems vague and confusing, but perhaps that was the point. No one knew what it meant, any more than they knew exactly what its opposite, Socialist Realism, meant. They could mean anything. Under the title of formalism, Shostakovich was attacked at different times for: being too simple, being too complex, being too light and trivial, being too gloomy and despairing, being too emotional, being too unemotional, including popular dance tunes, neglecting the music of the people, tossing out the old ways of the great composers, and following the old ways of the great composers from the pre-Revolutionary past. Decades later, shortly before Stalin died, someone supposedly asked him what formalism and Socialist Realism actually were. He shrugged and replied, “The Devil alone knows.”

  The Devil alone may have known, but Stalin, increasingly, was willing to kill on the Devil’s behalf. No matter what an artist did, no one was safe.

  The newspapers were filled with denunciations of Shostakovich, accusing him of being elitist and anti-people. “When I hear Shostakovich’s symphonies on the radio, I switch to a different program,” an electrician from the Red Labor Factory wrote in to Pravda.“We need the kind of music that can be understood by all Soviet people.” There was no acknowledgment that Shostakovich had written two of the most popular Russian hit songs of the 1930s (“The Song of the Counterplan” and “How Beautiful Life Will Be”). The newspapers relentlessly attacked him. He remembered miserably, “I was called an enemy of the people quietly and out loud from podiums. One paper made the following announcement of my concert: ‘Today there is a concert by enemy of the people Shostakovich.’”

  As he stalked nervously through the streets, he watched as friends crossed the road so they wouldn’t have to greet him. Many of them had just denounced him at meetings or in print. They were afraid of being seen with him.

  On the way home from his concert tour, Shostakovich stopped in Moscow to plead with the government’s Committee for Artistic Affairs. The chief of the committee suggested gently that Shostakovich should take himself into the hinterlands and spend his time recording the folk songs of Belorussia and Ukraine. It was not particularly helpful advice.

  Shostakovich went to talk to his one friend high up in the government: military genius Mikhail Tukhachevsky, one of the five marshals of the Red Army. Tukhachevsky, a music lover, had met Shostakovich years before. They had many friends in common. Rumor had it, for example, that Tukhachevsky was having an affair with an ex-girlfriend of Mayakovsky, the bellowing Bolshevik author of The
Bedbug.

  When Tukhachevsky was visiting Leningrad, he and Shostakovich would spend afternoons wandering through the vast Hermitage Museum (part of which was once the tsar’s Winter Palace), talking about art. Tukhachevsky was an amateur violinist, and they occasionally played music together. On other days, Tukhachevsky would have his chauffeur drive them out of Leningrad, deep into the woods, and they would stroll there, where they could talk more openly.

  Shostakovich arrived at Tukhachevsky’s apartment looking “dispirited, confused.” Tukhachevsky let him into his study and locked the door behind them. There was quite a contrast between the two men. As Shostakovich described it,

  I was a sickly youth while Tukhachevsky could put a man on a chair and then lift the chair, yes, lift the chair and its occupant by one leg with his arm outstretched. His office in Moscow had a gym with beams, a horizontal bar, and other incomprehensible equipment. . . . He turned off his phones. We sat in silence. And then we started talking very softly. I spoke softly because my grief and despair wouldn’t let me speak in my normal voice. Tukhachevsky spoke softly because he feared prying ears.

  Tukhachevsky promised to intercede for Shostakovich with Stalin. Shostakovich was enormously relieved to hear this. When he and Tukhachevsky walked out of the study, the composer sat down at the piano and began to play wild improvisations.

  He stayed in Moscow and waited anxiously for a call from Stalin. He had heard stories about the Great Leader reaching out to condemned writers to suggest ways they could save themselves. Shostakovich hoped that Tukhachevsky could convince Stalin to reconsider his case. He sat in his room for days, hardly seeing anyone, waiting for the phone to ring.

  But Stalin did not listen to Marshal Tukhachevsky’s plea for his musical friend. Though the Red Army officer and the composer did not know it, Stalin was already concocting a complicated plot to arrest and execute Tukhachevsky himself.