Soon after Russia’s massive cultural revolution of 1917, and Germany’s devastating defeat in the Great War, Soviet and Nazi authorities sought to regulate communication in the arts, hoping to unify the country and control public affairs.  Different from the modernist movement that existed in Germany and Western Europe, socialist realism was a musical ideology developed by the Soviet Union that encouraged optimism, folklore music and tonality.  Inspired in part by Vladimir Lenin’s statement that “art belongs to the people,” socialist realism was designed to inspire nationalism and patriotic pride.  In seeking to rejuvenate society after the Russian Revolution, Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre set up forty free concerts for the proletariat in an attempt to spread Russian art culture and national values.
       In Germany, composers like Alan Berg and Arnold Schoenberg led the modernist movement, which revolutionized the music world.  Some composers who carried on the modernist traditions of Germany and Western Europe established residency in Russia, where they were ordered by Stalin’s Communist Party to adhere to socialist realism when composing.  In the end, both Germans and Russians suffered under totalitarian rule during the twentieth century.  Nazism and Stalinism were manipulative regimes that forced musicians to hide their artistic means of expression for the good of society.
     Before totalitarian hierarchies manipulated German and Russian composers, both countries had endured great losses.  After the devastation of the Great War, Germany lost over one million lives, and had to pay off extensive war reparations, as demanded in the Treaty of Versailles (1919).  Following their cataclysmic defeat in total war, many Germans sought new life in Russia.  During WWI however, Russia was ravaged by revolution and political turmoil.  At first, a tragic massacre of a crowd of unarmed workers took place on January 22, 1905, outside the Tsar’s winter palace in St. Petersburg.  This event was labeled “Bloody Sunday.”  Another full-scale revolt occurred nearly a decade later.  As Russia mobilized to prepare for WWI, on March 9, 1917, women calling for bread in Petrograd started riots, which eventually led to the Russian Revolution.  The radical leader of the Bolshevik uprising, Vladimir Lenin, a German himself, proclaimed a new dream of national unity for Soviet Russia.  Years of social unrest and poor political management were over, Lenin declared.  Bolsheviks thereafter established a radical regime that revealed a new kind of authoritarian rule to the people of Russia.  The ruthless dictator, Joseph Stalin, later became the supreme ruler of the Soviet Union.
     In 1932, the Soviet Union and Germany became the first modern states to regulate art, literature, drama and music cultures.  The USSR established a variety of committees to emphasize the Party’s motives to restrict musicians.  These committees, closely observed by Soviet authorities, formulated a set of rules that emphasized the use of patriotic themes and Russian folk songs.  According to the Communist Party, the glorification of the Soviet man would stimulate patriotism and national pride.  Hence, the set of guidelines laid out by the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians in 1932 demanded that the “greatest attention of Soviet composers must be given to the victorious progressive foundations of reality.”  Russian artists who failed to comply with the terms laid out by the Composers’ Union faced public scorn, imprisonment or even execution.  The stringent guidelines of socialist realism also prohibited “formalism,” a term used by Soviet officials to denigrate offensive music that contained abstract, dismal melodies.  The Composers’ Union labeled formalistic music as “art hostile to realism and detached from objective reality,” and Union officials censured “adventurous music,” or anything dissonant that did not reflect the heroic ideals of the Soviet proletariat.  
     A particular Soviet composer who was banned for his dissonant, modernist depiction of the Soviet working class was Alexander Mossolov.  His work, Iron Foundry, was an orchestral piece intended to communicate the sounds of machinery experienced by the Soviet proletariat.   Regrettably, Mossolov’s outward approval of the avant-garde and the formalistic futurist movement got him into trouble with Soviet authorities, and he was consequently labeled “an enemy of the Soviet people.”  Mossolov represents one of many Russian artists who personally felt the effects of political oppression; the composer fled Moscow before Stalin’s henchmen could arrest him.  Mossolov’s struggle with political oppression is one illustration of the nation-wide struggle against the rigid policies of the Communist Party.
      The rules outlined under socialist realism directly restricted the artistic ingenuity of Dmitri Shostakovich.  Known as the first important music child of the revolution of 1917, Shostakovich was subjected to political denunciation and public scorn because he willingly experimented with modernism and tonal dissonance.  The modernist movement that existed in Western Europe influenced Shostakovich’s abstract, dissonant subjects.  Shostakovich particularly modeled the musical ideas of Arnold Schoenberg, a German composer who thrived on experimentation and atonality in his musical communication.  Schoenberg’s development of 12-tone serialism revolutionized music in the 20^th century; the discovery changed music expression in Western Europe and Germany, but not in Russia. 
     As Stalin cut off radio communication with Western influences during the Great Terror (1936-38), Shostakovich experienced the most oppressive year of his musical career in 1936, when Soviet officials openly rebuked his opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District.  Although it was performed 83 times in Leningrad and 97 times in Moscow, Lady Macbeth outraged Soviet officials with its bold abstractionism.  Stalin, who stormed out of the Bolshoi Theatre after the first act, was especially offended by the offensive protagonist, Katerina, whose pessimism is depicted with dissonance and atonality.  Stalin feared that the opera’s lack of optimism would jeopardize patriotic fervor and strength of the proletariat, and to express his dislike of the work, Stalin issued an editorial in the Communist newspaper that attacked Shostakovich for creating a “bedlam of noise.” The article, titled “Muddle Instead of Music,” was published on January 28, 1936, and it furiously labeled Lady Macbeth as anti-socialist:
     From the first minute, the listener is shocked by deliberate dissonance, by a confused stream of sound. Snatches of melody, the beginnings of a musical phrase, are drowned, emerge again, and disappear in a grinding and squealing roar. To follow this ‘music’ is most difficult; to remember it, impossible. …Shostakovich ignored the demand of Soviet culture that all coarseness and savagery be abolished from every corner of Soviet life.  The music quacks, grunts, growls and suffocates itself.
     The psychological impact of the editorial and the public humiliation Shostakovich faced were severe, as the composer remarked, “From that moment on I was stuck with the label ‘enemy of the people.’” In a letter to his friend, Isaac Glikman, Shostakovich acknowledged years after Stalin’s death that the dictator succeeded in oppressing his artistic means of communication.  “For years, the article used to instill fear, to threaten,” Shostakovich wrote to his friend a year before his death in 1975. “Stalin got what he wanted. Not only was it forbidden to speak out against this article, but you couldn’t even reveal the slightest reservation about it. Anyone who took issue with it was committing a sin against the religion of Stalinism.”  Following Stalin’s vicious editorial in Pravda, the Central Committee of the Communist Party passed a resolution in September of 1937 that attacked specific composers, including Shostakovich, for their expressed interest in avant-garde dissonance.  Moreover, the political denunciation of both Lady Macbeth and his early symphonies scarred Shostakovich and weakened his ability to communicate musically.  Soon after the denunciation of Lady Macbeth, Shostakovich withdrew his dissonant fourth symphony from its scheduled premiere, fearing that the Composers’ Union would chastise him yet again. 
     Despite severe political censure, Shostakovich continued to experiment with the modernist concepts that evolved in Germany and Western Europe.  As the Soviet Union became a world superpower during the late 1930s with its plans of mass industrialization, Shostakovich attempted to comply with governmental demands, but at the same time, he remained faithful to his own artistic integrity.  After the Soviet Composers’ Union banned Lady Macbeth, Shostakovich responded with “a constructive creative answer of a Soviet artist to just criticism.” This response was Shostakovich’s fifth symphony, which revealed the sufferings and triumphs of the Soviet man, according to the composer.  The conclusion of the four-movement piece was optimistic and patriotic.  “In the finale,” Shostakovich said of his symphony, “the tragically tense impulses of the earlier movements are resolved in optimism and joy of living.”  Therefore, Shostakovich regained his popularity in the USSR, since the symphony was well received by Soviet authorities and the general public.
     Shostakovich was not the only artist who came under fire during Stalin’s Great Terror and the “Doctor’s Plot”(1953).  During these periods, Stalin persecuted two of Shostakovich’s close friends: Vsevolod Meyerhold and Moisev Vainberg (1919-1996), which in turn, impacted Shostakovich’s musical communication.  During the Great Terror, Stalin exterminated 1.5 million people in little over two years; the dictator made 366 death lists with 44,000 names listed in red ink.  One of Shostakovich’s contemporaries who was affected during the Great Purges was Meyerhold.  Labeled the ringleader of formalism in the avant-garde theater, Meyerhold was suddenly arrested in 1939 and sent to Siberia where he was executed in a Gulag in 1940.  When Stalin compared Shostakovich’s early symphonic works to “the most negative features of ‘Meyerholdism’ infinitely multiplied,” Shostakovich boldly responded with a symphony commemorating “Meyerholdism.”  Published soon after Meyerhold’s arrest in 1939, Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 6 reflected Meyerhold’s use of formalism.  For example, the symphony opens with a long, dark melody played in unison, accompanied by a dissonant monologue of brass that ends in dead silence, and the final movement resembles a funeral march.  Shostakovich’s firm approval of Meyerholdism and his personal relationship with the dramatist influenced his sixth symphony.  Shostakovich risked his life for the sake of communicating the modernist views of Meyerhold’s style. 
     Another musician whose family was victimized by Stalin’s Great Purges was Svyatoslav Richter, a renowned Soviet concert pianist who concealed his German heritage for his own safety.  Hailed as the “best pianist in the world,” Richter was born to a Russian mother and German father.  Throughout his childhood, Richter, who lived in a rural province, struggled with German and Russian expression.  Eventually, Richter aspired to become a great musician, and likewise auditioned for the Moscow Conservatory, under Heinrich Neuhaus, who was also of German descent.  Neuhaus was impressed with Richter’s performance, and Richter thereafter became a well-known musician in the Soviet Union.  However, during the Stalinist purges and leading up to WWII, Richter found himself in a precarious situation: he was half German and half Russian.  All non-Russians, particularly Germans experienced a period of uncertainty during the Great Terror.  Many people of German descent perished during the Purges, including Richter's father, who was killed in the city of Odessa.  Despite personal setbacks, due to his German heritage, Richter still performed to the best of his ability in Communist Russia.
     The Polish-Jew, Moisev Vainberg, also endured great hardships under Stalin’s firm hand.  Vainberg, who was arrested during the aftermath of Stalin’s “Doctor’s Plot,” gave Shostakovich the inspiration to compose Jewish folk music in memory of Vainberg’s struggle.  Regarded as one of Shostakovich’s riskiest compositions, the song cycle From Jewish Folk Poetry was written in response to the regime’s anti-Semitic policies.  Shostakovich kept the score hidden in a drawer for seven years until its premiere in 1955, two years after Stalin’s death in 1953.  By secretly composing the work during “the black year of 1948,” a year of severe political denunciation of Soviet artists, Shostakovich was bold in his protestation against the government. Overall, the plight of Shostakovich’s artistic contemporaries affected his musical communication.  He later wrote in his memoirs that in his music he represented the struggles of certain friends, who were imprisoned or executed during the Great Terror.  Referring to Stalin’s devastating purges, Shostakovich declared, “Too many of my friends died and were buried in places unknown to anyone.  I think constantly of my friends, and in almost every major work I try to remind others of them.”
     Unlike Meyerhold, who was executed in a Siberian Gulag, Shostakovich successfully avoided exile by finding creative, inconspicuous ways to communicate through music.  Shostakovich’s resistance against totalitarian policies revealed his creative courage and independence of mind.  A prime example of Shostakovich’s creativity was his creation of the monogram “D-S-C-H,” used in his tenth symphony to inscribe his initials into the piece. The letters correspond to the German transliteration of notes D, E-flat, C, and B, and Shostakovich felt that with this inscription, his spirit would remain forever in his music.  In Germany, transliterating notes was common practice for musicians ever since Johannes Sebastian Bach transcribed his name in the 1600s.
     Another example of Shostakovich’s subtle means of communication is evident in his Seventh Symphony Leningrad, published in 1941 at the height of World War II, in which the composer found a creative way to communicate his opposition towards both Nazism and Stalinism.  After Hitler broke the non-aggression pact with Stalin in 1941, German forces launched an assault on two major Russian cities: Leningrad and Stalingrad.  As Leningrad was besieged and bombed by German strike forces, Shostakovich wrote the symphonic development sections and march themes of his seventh symphony.  Shostakovich later ended the three-movement piece with a patriotic finale, entitled “Victory, a beautiful life in the future.”  When first listened to, the symphonic work pleased Stalin and Soviet authorities, particularly for its realistic qualities and spirited nationalism.  However, before depicting an optimistic “future” in the finale, Shostakovich commemorated the thousands of innocent lives lost during the horror of Stalin’s Great Purges. Therefore, to create an anti-Stalinist aura, Shostakovich composed a funeral march with a somber violin section, which gave rise to a feeling of mass mourning.  Because Shostakovich’s disapproval of Stalinism went undetected in the seventh symphony, Shostakovich succeeded in resisting through musical communication.  Shostakovich later confessed in his memoirs that he wrote his seventh symphony to commemorate the victims of totalitarianism in Soviet Russia.  “I feel eternal pain for those killed on Stalin’s orders. I suffered for everyone who was tortured, shot, or starved.”  Shostakovich’s most celebrated work is his seventh symphony, created as a symbol of anti-Nazi propaganda for both Russia and its allies.  In America, Shostakovich’s work was nationally broadcasted on television before America entered the Second World War.   Considered one of Shostakovich’s most artistic compositions in the eyes of Stalin and the Communist Party, the 80-minute piece received the Stalin Prize in 1941, despite its hidden anti-Stalinist theme.
     After the Second World War, Germans were ousted from Russia.  The antipathy held for German-Russians was severe.  The government issued decrees ordering the removal of Volga Germans on August 28, 1941. Two months later, Germans in the North and South Caucasus, as well as those in St. Petersburg, were deported back to Germany. 
     After Stalin’s death in 1953, the Union of Soviet Composers loosened socialist music guidelines, and artistic communication in Russia changed for the better.  For Shostakovich and Richter, Stalin’s death presented the opportunity to perform and compose freely.  Shostakovich’s second and third symphonies, which had been dismissed as anti-nationalistic “youthful experiments” during Stalin’s reign (1929-1953) were republished after 1953.  Even though the Communist Party was severe in its censure of Lady Macbeth in 1936, Shostakovich decided to reintroduce his most controversial work by renaming it Katerina Iamailova.  With the revival of works that Shostakovich had stored away for years in order to elude Soviet authorities, Shostakovich succeeded in revealing his most controversial forms of communication after the death of Stalin.  Shostakovich’s greatest achievement was his ability to survive totalitarianism and the harsh realities he faced as a Soviet composer. “Shostakovich suffered for his contemporaries,” said Mstislav Rostropovich, a cellist and close friend of the composer.  The sacrifices Shostakovich made for his country distinguish him as a Russian hero.  He represented a spirit of hope for creative minds who sought to express the truth through music and art. 
     Today it can be declared that musicians from Germany and Russia were so influential to the development of the Soviet Union in the twentieth century.  The life of Shostakovich stands out amongst all other musicians who endured communist oppression.  For several decades, the government policies of socialist realism, as mandated by the Union of Soviet Composers, forced Shostakovich and all artists in Soviet Russia to glorify the Soviet worker.  Based on his resiliency to resist political oppression, Shostakovich stood out as “one of the most important composers of the twentieth century.”   Today, many German-Russians effectively contributed to the advancement of Russia’s music and social cultures.  The musicians’ struggle with communist rule will remain a symbol of hope and creative courage for generations of musicians.