Creative Resilience: Soviet Composers' Strategic Relationship to the State Censor

Soviet composers received remarkable support from their government, including awards, access to privileged goods, and most importantly, state commissions, which provided payment for their cultural production. In exchange, however, they were compelled to submit their work for approval by the Committee on Arts Affairs, the state’s primary censor. The Committee was severely overburdened, charged with controlling a wide variety of activities while liaising with parallel state and Party agencies, often with overlapping competencies. As a result, the Committee operated quite haphazardly, failing to communicate with composers, make decisions on their submissions, and release payments in a timely manner. For composers, this presented a major problem, as their works could be neither performed, published, nor compensated without the Committee’s approval. This difficulty was significantly intensified in the late-Stalinist period by the onset of the zhdanovshchina, the state’s crackdown on the creative intelligentsia in the first postwar years.

            This paper will explore Soviet composers’ resilient response to this issue: developing a range of strategies for shepherding their creative work through the official censorship process to payment, performance, and publication. Drawing on a unique archival collection of composers’ correspondence with the Committee on Arts Affairs between 1947 and 1949, I will demonstrate Soviet composers’ expression of their agency through tactics like creating personal relationships with censors, engaging in trickery, mobilizing legalistic language, and inducing guilt. While such tactics were frequently successful, I will argue that having to resort to them ultimately left composers in the position of resilient supplicants, rather than true citizens.