Introduction

Only two categories of humankind in Soviet society were worthy of attention: on the one hand, a cynical, cruel, corrupt communist elite and, on the other, a courageous handful of dissidents. The perpetual and tempting presence of evil in a Soviet citizen’s everyday life served as the most efficient means for training the instinct for existential choice. The tardy renaissance of the Soviet musical avant-garde of the 1920s—a characteristic phenomenon of the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries— was and is more visible in the West than in late Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. Especially of note is the fact that Dmitriy Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth was staged at the Venice Biennale of 1947, on the eve of the catastrophe of 1948 and some a decade and a half before the opera’s ‘rehabilitation’ in Soviet Russia. The Soviet music could not stand the test of the freedom that came suddenly in the mid-1980s.