His brother-in-law, mother-in-law, and uncle were all taken away. To know him was dangerous to associate with him, suicidal. He was listed in the press as an enemy of the people. Shostakovich was immediately shunned by almost everybody he knew.

Entitled ‘Chaos instead of Music’, it made clear that ‘things could end very badly’ for the composer unless he changed his avant-garde style. An article which everyone could tell had been written by Stalin himself denounced his recent opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk as ‘coarse, primitive, and vulgar’. This was the context in which Dmitri Shostakovich read Pravda on 28th January 1936. It is impossible to know what it must feel like as a permanent condition of life. It is hard to imagine what that kind of fear must feel like. People lived in extreme dread at night and with an intense effort by day to pretend that they were enthusiastic for the system. The writer Isaak Babel observed that ‘a man could only talk freely with his wife and even then only at night, with the blankets pulled over their heads.’ Every man became an island. There was not a single thinking adult who did not at some time expect to be arrested or shot. A woman got a similar punishment for saying that a certain disgraced general was quite handsome. One man was executed for receiving a pair of shoes from abroad. A doctor who had treated a German consul was arrested, as was an opera singer who danced with the Japanese ambassador. Any contact with foreigners was equally disastrous. One district, in order to meet its target of 3,800 arrests, decided to rearrest every prisoner who had been released the previous year.

One village lost all its men aged between 20 and 50, accused of sabotage by sowing the crops too late. To meet these quotas, the charges brought were often absurd. He had decided that 5% of the population was an appropriate level of arrests to maintain and to do this a certain quota was needed every week. Stalin preferred people to support him through fear rather than conviction as he was well aware that convictions could not be relied on. One man alone denounced 230 people, all of whom would have been either executed or sent to prison.

Denouncing in fact became one of the main ways to survive. Mistrust was created by persuading as many people as possible to denounce their fellow citizens as enemies of the state. The dictator could maintain power as long as there was no unified effort to oppose him and there would not be whilst everyone was scared not only of him but of each other too. The main purpose of the terror that Stalin inflicted on the Soviet people in the 1930s was simply to create fear itself. Mark’s notes on Shostakovich Symphony Nos.

Program notes shostakovich symphony 6