Post Description

Produced by Ben Turner


In the summer of 1956 Soviet schoolchildren found that their history exams were cancelled. The reason was that Nikita Khrushchev had made a 'secret speech' in February of that year to the 20th Communist Party Conference, denouncing Stalin and what he euphemistically termed the 'personality cult'. Suddenly history was not what every child and young adult in the Soviet Union had been taught it was, and an army of authors was drafted in to re-write it (the process was to be repeated 35 years later with glasnost and the collapse of Communism and the Soviet Union). 

Shostakovich had little to unlearn, however. He had grown up in a family with highly developed social and political awareness; he had had abundant contact with the free-thinking and not-so-free-thinking intelligentsia in the comparatively undoctrinaire 1920s; and he had been at the sharp end of Stalinist repression for more than 20 years, including career-threatening disgraces in 1936 and 1948. He also kept himself up to date with the rumblings of dissension in Poland and Hungary in the aftermath of Khrushchev's speech (the Poles won relative autonomy, especially in the arts, while the Hungarians were crushed). 

He then did a curious thing. In the following year he composed a symphony commemorating a famous atrocity in pre-communist Russia – the original Bloody Sunday in fact - whose events are worth recapping. 1905 was a year of revolutionary upheaval. On 9 January (22 January by the Western calendar) a crowd of between 5,000 and 16,000 workers and their families convergedon the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, unarmed, carrying icons and portraits of the Tsar and singing hymns, intending to present a petition to Nicholas II, appealing over the heads of local officials and bosses to alleviate the misery that overdue industrial development was inflicting on them. The Tsar had been advised to leave the capital and no one had been delegated to receive the petition. After the customary warning-shots failed to disperse the crowd the authorities lost their nerve, resorting to cavalry charges and infantry fire which left some 200 dead and 500 wounded (the figures were wildly exaggerated by the Western press at the time and by the Soviets in later years). Word spread that the Tsar, the 'Little Father', had betrayed his people, and this single event did more to revolutionize the workers of Russia than decades of agitation and propaganda had done. 

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