There was a time when Stalin, at the peak of his power and terror, encouraged avant-garde Soviet composers to tour Europe and scare the bourgeoisie with ultra-modern, dissonant music celebrating the communist obsession with heavy industry.
But most of these composers sooner of later fell afoul of Stalin’s highly unpredictable tastes as to what constituted “Good Soviet Art”.
These four short pieces show some of the variety of this period, a time when many in “the West” chose to know nothing of the Terror and tended to idealize Soviet Russia.