The rather dry subtitle belies an engaging and pleasurable tour through the middle decades of twentieth-century Soviet musical life. These events have received extensive, if less captivating, attention in recent years. Frolova-Walker takes a fresh angle on the topic by using the prism of the Stalin Prizes to analyze the musical world of the 1940s and 1950s. She accords the prizes a central role, and convincingly demonstrates how they interacted with and indeed shaped important aesthetic and political debates. Readers with some background in Soviet music and politics at mid-century will have a much easier time with this narrative, which can often feel like the insider's story that in a sense it is, written by a scholar educated in the late Soviet Union and heir to the mid-century tradition, using as her main primary source the protocols of various meetings. A dizzying array of figures, major and minor, are splashed across the pages, some of them for just a moment.
The expected figures of Dmitrii Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev, Nikolai Miaskovskii, and a darkly-painted Tikhon Khrennikov take center stage. Despite some recent attempts to relativize or even rehabilitate the longtime head of the Composers' Union, Khrennikov here comes across as a culpable and craven individual (256–57). Miaskovksii assumes a key role and, indeed, even the “institutional epicentre” (158) in this analysis. He proved essential to the workings of the musical world, and his music was an important touchstone. Although Prokofiev won more prizes—six—than any other composer, his persona and work rather recede into the background in this narrative.
A somewhat unexpected Shostakovich emerges in this re-telling, rather different from the close-lipped, dour figure in so many other works. He gets full treatment in two chapters, and appears regularly throughout the book. In the prize discussions, he offered biting criticism and actively supported those he deemed worthy. We see him more active, taking positions and engaging in the political-aesthetic debates of the era. In an interesting side note with larger implications, Frolova-Walker undermines an important plank in Solomon Volkov's Shostakovich and Stalin, in which Volkov posits that Stalin himself selected Shostakovich's Piano Quintet for a prize in 1941. She devotes her second chapter to a detailed examination of the discussions during this first year that prizes were awarded. Here she convincingly shows that the Quintet received a prize due to its appreciation by a large number of Stalin Prize Committee members; Stalin's potential advocacy of the piece is largely incidental. Such a role for Stalin is largely typical in her story, and is one of her key arguments: the dictator had a voice and took interest, but “Stalin's whims had a direct effect in only a handful of cases” (9).
It is no surprise coming from this expert on Russian music and nationalism, but she attempts to rehabilitate some of the massive output of “national music”—based in folk material, while embracing Russian classical traditions and the techniques of 19th-century western music. Such music was absolutely central to Soviet culture and, while much of it was “blandly generic work and downright incompetent,” there was also fine music and even “hidden gems” (180–81).
In lieu of a conclusion, Frolova-Walker engages in a discussion of socialist realism in light of her study. She claims, convincingly, that the Prizes and discussion around them offer a working definition of this aesthetic ideology. And contrary to the views of many scholars, she argues that there is a there there; the socialist-realist canon was made up of pieces that realized Stalin's prescription “national in form, socialist in content.” These were works in a national style based on folk music, and were often cantatas, concertos, or middlebrow works like symphonic suites that had patriotic or historical themes. (290) This examination of the Stalin Prizes “allows us to see socialist realism within a coherent narrative framework, evolving slowly, never changing beyond recognition, with demarcations between core works, acceptable but marginal works and the unacceptable” (292). She concludes that both the Stalin Prizes and socialist realism lost momentum in the early 1950s, prompting a push to artistic quality and independence after Stalin's death.
