ABSTRACT
As cold-war antagonisms grew, the government placed enormous resources into arms development, successfully testing an atom bomb in August 1949. The campaign against 'rootless cosmopolitanism' also continued in the early 1950s, although less intensely than in 1949. Central Committee decrees on literature, music and other areas of arts and culture in the late 1940s effectively terrorized the intelligentsia. Politically, Shostakovich's position remained uncertain in Stalin's final years. On the personal side, while enduring his first wife Nina's longstanding affair with her nuclear-physicist colleague, Artem Alikhanyan, Shostakovich himself became involved in a close personal relationship that would directly affect the content of the Fifth Quartet. Galina Ustvolskaya, a composition student at the Leningrad Conservatory, began to study with Shostakovich in 1940. Shostakovich completed the Fifth Quartet on 1 November 1952. The last years of Stalin's rule brought continued privation and repression.
