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Russia: The Wild East

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Factual: History

A history of Russia, written and presented by Martin Sixsmith

Russia: The Wild East: Series 2

Russia: The Wild East: Series 2: Episode 8: Socialist Realism

Episode 8

Episode 8: Socialist Realism

Series 2

Socialist Realism

BBC Radio 4 - Russia: The Wild East, Series 2, Socialist Realism

The doctrine of Socialist Realism subordinates the creative arts to the will of the state.

Martin Sixsmith speaks to the artists and the henchmen of the regime who lived through the persecution of the Stalin years, to try to understand the role of art in a time of fear.

"My husband was like the little bird in the old Russian poem: they capture him and squeeze him by the throat -and then they tell him to sing!" Irina Shostakovich tells Martin Sixsmith. "They banned his music, he lost his job. But he wrote his secret revenge, his music". 

For this programme, Sixsmith has spoken to those who lived through the persecution of the Stalin years - writers, composers and henchmen of the regime - to try to understand the role of art in a time of fear. "It allowed us to keep alive our freedom of memory and independence of thought in the dark years when 'they' were trying to reduce us to nothing..." says Yevgeny Pasternak of whose father, Boris, Stalin wrote on his police file: 'Leave that cloud-dweller in peace'. Sixsmith tells the stories of Anna Akhmatova who committed her verse to memory and burned the manuscripts; Osip Mandelstam who let rip - just once - with savage unguarded hatred for Stalin, was arrested and sent to the Gulag where he died; theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold who was tortured in the cells of the Lubyanka. 

The poet Vladimir Mayakovsky epitomises the destiny of many who loved the revolution, and then, desperately out-of-love, committed suicide; and Sergei Prokofiev who fled abroad only to find he could live neither in his native land nor outside it. On his return, he was denounced by Tikhon Khrennikov, the head of the Soviet Composers' Union, and like Miaskovsky and Khatchaturian forced to make a humiliating public recantation for his musical 'crimes'. 

When Khrennikov spoke to Sixsmith shortly before his death he fiercely rejected suggestions that he'd been a willing accomplice in the repression of musical life: "When I said No! it meant No. But - what else could I have done? Stalin's word was law." 

Historical Consultant - Professor Geoffrey Hosking


Producer: Anna Scott-Brown & Adam Fowler
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Episode 8: Socialist Realism

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