ABSTRACT
The turn for music came in the beginning of the year 1948. In the first half of December 1947, the deputy director of the department of agitation and propaganda of the Party’s Central Committee Dmitriy Shepilov and the head of the same department’s art section Polikarp Lebedev sent a secret letter ‘About the Drawbacks in the Development of Soviet Music’ to the secretariat of the Central Committee. In any case, the ‘conflictlessness’ of the late 1940s and early 1950s gave to artists much less opportunity for expressing their individualities than the big Soviet style of the past. It is necessary to mention several large-scale projects initiated by some leading composers in the post-1948 years and completed after the dictator’s death. Other noticeable musical events of the year 1948 include the ‘discovery’ of a Russian symphony composed as early as 1809, when Glinka, universally recognized as the founder of Russian symphonic music, was only five years old.
