ABSTRACT
Cultural life in the Soviet Union relaxed only gradually, partially and intermittently, after the death of Stalin. Perhaps the first signal that things were changing was a brief but extraordinary April 1953 Pravda article, acknowledging that the Doctors' Plot arrests had been made without lawful basis, that confessions had been obtained from the doctor-defendants through illegal means and the defendants, completely exonerated, had been released. The release of the Doctors' Plot defendants was soon followed on 27 April 1953 by release of Shostakovich's friend, the composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg, who, as son-in-law of Solomon Mikhoels and relative by marriage of the lead Doctors' Plot defendant Miron Vovsi, had been arrested in February 1953. In the opening Allegretto, the composer's encryptions and the cadential formula not only emphasize the work's reported self-dedication, but, as Yusfin pointed out, they also provide the harmonic conflict that drives the work, where Ds and 'S's vie consistently with one another as 'alternative dominants'.
