Research

Leading Soviet composers during the late Stalinist era

I am a cultural historian of the Soviet Union. My research investigates the intense interplay of cultural production, socialist aesthetics, and state authority in the Stalinist and post-Stalinist eras. As an interdisciplinary scholar, I employ both historical and musicological methodologies to investigate how the creation and censorship of classical music in the Soviet Union provides insight into the broader politics of culture and power in the Soviet context and beyond.

My current book manuscript, Creative Comrades: Censorship and Collaboration in Late-Stalinist Music, examines classical music censorship during the late-Stalinist repression of the Intelligentsia. I argue that in the absence of clearly defined aesthetic standards and the presence of high-stakes consequences for transgression, Soviet composers resorted to collective professional self-censorship, which proved far more effective at controlling their creative production than the state could have achieved alone. My research rejects the standard state-vs.-artist paradigm and generates new insight by introducing a more complex framework for understanding Soviet music censorship and authorship as collaborative processes. Socialist Realism, the official Soviet aesthetic, had no clear application to music, yet composers were held collectively responsible for individual missteps. As my research demonstrates, composers responded to this situation by behaving coercively toward one another within their Union’s consultative apparatus, in an effort to protect the entire group from official retribution. At the same time, I uncover the deep roots of Soviet compositional and censorial practices by tracing their evolution from collaborative traditions unique to 19th-century Russian music. With case studies as illustration, I establish that new Soviet musical works were so profoundly shaped by the mandatory collaborative process of critique and revision that the colleagues and censors who took part are best understood not merely as advisors and regulators, but as co-authors. By demonstrating that imposed collaboration resulted in works of lasting value, my research moves the scholarship beyond traditional questions of state interference to reform how we conceptualize creativity within and beyond the Soviet context. Further, it works to redefine the term “censorship” itself and creates a frame for interrogating related forces like market pressures, social shaming, and even peer review that drive collaborative creativity across today’s globalized world. I have published articles based on this research in Journal of Musicology, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, and Perspectives on Europe (you can find my articles here).

Expanding my focus to the Soviet empire, my second project, “Composing the Union,” continues my exploration of Soviet cultural politics by investigating the Stalinist and post-Stalinist effort to legitimize Soviet authority in Central Asia through cultural construction. Beginning in the 1930s, composers were sent from Moscow to the Central Asia republics to spearhead the creation of new “national” operas that were to be, in Stalin’s phrase, “national in form, socialist in content.” These Russian composers, assisted by local aspirants, made ethnographic collections of local folksongs and legends, then reworked them to create spurious historical narratives demonstrating the benefits of Soviet power. I will argue that the real purpose of these operas was to weave the republics tightly into the Soviet fabric, thereby creating a unified Soviet imaginary and bestowing a fully Soviet identity on their populations. This project will advance our understanding of the dynamics of Soviet empire and shed light on the Soviet state’s use of culture as a soft power mechanism for legitimizing Soviet rule.