What Did the West Know?
The Repression of Composers in the Soviet Union
Deutsche Fassung
Abstract
Only recently has music research addressed the persecution of musicians under Stalinism. Western publications had already published information about this after the Second World War. But these writings revealed more about Cold War patterns of thinking than the mecha-nisms of music-related repression in the Soviet Union. Some of what was dismissed at the time as the anti-Communist propaganda of Soviet émigrés turned out to be true. Once determined by an entrenched means of interpretation, the view to the facts is now free.
(Osteuropa 7/2010, pp. 67–78)