ABSTRACT
The newborn all-Union organization of musicians who, according to statute, had to ‘uphold the platform of the Soviet power and to participate in socialist construction’, was baptized Union of Soviet Composers; in 1957, it was renamed Union of Composers of the USSR. The functions of the chairman of the Union’s Moscow branch were committed to Nikolay Chelyapov – an ideological functionary and specialist in jurisprudence, who in the second half of the 1920s had edited the relatively moderate periodical Muzika i revolyutziya. In the whole annals of early Soviet music there was literally no score that could withstand the artificial selection. The establishment of the centralized creative unions, including the Union of Soviet Composers, resulted in, among other things, the centralization of the whole system of sponsoring artistic activities. The first Soviet operas appeared in 1925, after years of uncertainty as regards the appropriateness of the genre of opera for the so-called worker and peasant audience.
