This worthless song was performed by soloists and choirs, violinists and pianists, even string quartets did it. It didn't get as far as a symphony orchestra, but only because some of the instruments were suspect-the trombone, for instance.
You can see there was plenty of reason to fall into despair. It looked as though neither orchestral music nor the opera had any prospects at all. And most musicians were in a terrible mood. One after another, with bowed heads, they joined the ranks of RAPM. For instance, my friend Ronya Shebalin suddenly began singing the praises of Davidenko. I protected myself by working at TRAM.
RAPM had turned the screw so tight that it seemed things couldn't possibly be any worse. (Later it turned out that they could be a lot worse.) And when RAPM disappeared, everyone heaved a sigh of relief. For a time, professionals were in charge of things; I mean, natu•
rally they had no power, but their suggestions were taken into account, and that was quite something.
I went to Turkey as part of a semiofficial cultural delegation. They were trying to improve relations with Turkey and President Kemal
*The Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (1920-1932) and its "musical" offshoot, the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians (1923-1932), arose as instruments of the cultural policies of the Party. The influence of these unions was almost overwhelming at the end of the 1920s and into the early 1930s. They often turned out to be greater royalists than the king, and were disbanded by Stalin when he decided that the or�izations had served their function. ·
tThis song by one of the leaders of RAPM, Alexander Davidenko, was written in late 1 929, after Soviet-Chinese conflict in the Far East. One of the first successful examples of the popular Soviet propaganda song, "They Wanted to Beat Us" remained popular right up to World War II, when its dashing tone seemed inappropriate.
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Ataturk, who arranged endless receptions for us. All the men received inscribed gold cigarette cases and all the women got bracelets. They fussed over us greatly. Turkey's musical life was iii an embryonic stage then. David Oistrakh and Lev Oborin, who were part of the delegation, needed some sheet music-I think it was · Beethoven-and it couldn't be found in all of Ankara. They played everything they could remember by heart.
I learned to wear a tuxedo in Turkey, since I had to wear one every evening, and when I got home I showed it off to my friends and acquaintances. I was rewarded for my tuxedo sufferings with a soccer game between Vienna and Turkey. When the Austrians made a goal there was absolute silence in the stadium, and the match ended in a huge brawl.
But it was fun. We drank coffee and then didn't sleep-not from the coffee, but from its price. I went into a store to buy a pair of glasses.
The owner demonstrated how strong the glasses were by flinging them down onto the floor; twice they didn't break. He wanted to show me a third time. I said, "Don't bother, it's all right." He didn't listen to me, threw them down a third time, and broke them.
After my trip to Turkey, which got a lot of coverage in the Soviet papers, I was offered guest performances at very flattering terms. I went on one of these trips, to Arkhangelsk, with the cellist Viktor Kubatsky. He played my cello sonata. On January 28, 1 936, we went to the railroad station to buy a new Pravda. I opened it up and leafed through it-and found the article "Muddle Instead of Music." I'll never forget that day, it's probably the most memorable in my life.
That article on the third page of Pravda changed my entire existence. It was printed without a signature, like an editorial-that is, it expressed the opinion of the Party. But it actually expressed the opinion of Stalin, and that was much more important.
There is a school of thought that holds that the article was written by the well-known bastard Zaslavsky.* It might have been written down by the well-known bastard Zaslavsky, but that's another matter
*David Iosifovich Zaslavsky (1880-1965), a journalist, whom Lenin, before the Revolution, had called a "notorious slanderer" and a "blackmailing pen for hire." He became a trusted Stalin crony and died a respected member of the staff of Pravda. The last well-known article by Zaslavsky is "Ballyhoo o[ Reactionary Propaganda Around a Literary Weed," which appeared in Pravda in 1958 and marked the beginning of the campaign against Pasternak.
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entirely. The article has too much of Stalin in it, there are expressions that even Zaslavsky wouldn't have used, they were too ungrammatical.
After all, the article appeared before the big purges. There were still some fairly literate people working at Pravda and they wouldn't . have left in that famous part about my music having nothing in common with "symphonic soundings." What are these mysterious "symphonic soundings" ? It's clear that this is a genuine pronouncement of our leader and teacher. There are many places like that in the article. I can distinguish with complete confidence Zaslavsky's bridges from Stalin's text.
The title-"Muddle Instead of Music"-also belongs to Stalin. The day before, Pravda had printed the leader and teacher's brilliant comments on the outlines of new history textbooks, and he talked about muddles there too.
This text by the Leader of the Peoples and Friend of Children was printed over his signature. Obviously, the word "muddle" stuck in his mind, something that often happens to the mentally ill. And so he used the word everywhere. Really, why call it a muddle?
All right, the opera was taken off the stage. Meetings were organized to drum the "muddle" into everyone's head. Everyone turned away from me. There was a phrase in the article saying that all this
"could end very badly." They were all waiting for the bad end to come.
It went on as if in a nightmare. One of my friends, whom Stalin knew, thought that he might be of some help, and he wrote a desperate letter to Stalin. His letter maintained that Shostakovich wasn't a lost soul after all, and that besides the depraved opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District, which was criticized with perfect justification by our glorious organ Pravda, Shostakovich had also written several musical works singing the praises of our socialist homeland.
Stalin attended a ballet with my music called Bright Stream, which was being done at the Bolshoi. Lopukhov had staged the ballet in Leningrad, where it had been popular, and he was invited to stage it in Moscow. And after doing this ballet, he was named director of ballet for the Bolshoi Theater. The results of the leader an� teacher's cultural outing are known-not even ten days after the first article in 1 1 4
Pravda, another appeared. It was written more grammatically, with fewer nuggets, but that didn't make it any more pleasant as far as I was concerned.
Two editorial attacks in Pravda in ten days-that was too much for one man. Now everyone knew for sure that I would be destroyed. And the anticipation of that noteworthy event-at least for me-has never left me.
From that moment on I was stuck with the label "enemy of the people," and I don't need to explain what the label meant in those days.
Everyone still remembers that.
I was called an enemy of the people quietly and out loud and from podiums. One paper made the following announcement of my concert: