A composer to be badly treated in every way was Shostakovich. During Stalin’s purges, when disobedience very often meant death or the gulag, government decree dictated what was good art, acceptable art. Stalin attended Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District on 26 January 1936 in Moscow. The next day, the state newspaper Pravda’s editorial condemned Shostakovich’s music as anti-Soviet ugliness. “The ability of good music to enthral the masses,” it read, “has been sacrificed on the altar of petit-bourgeois formalism. This is playing at abstruseness - and such games can only finish badly." Shostakovich feared for his life. His opera was immediately withdrawn and he never composed another.

One of Shostakovich’s staunchest defenders was his friend the pianist Maria Yudina. Many of her closest friends lost to the Gulag labour camps or worse, Yudina was defiant to the core, wearing her cross very visibly, championing the most adventurous blacklisted works, and reading banned poets like Boris Pasternak and Nikolai Zabolotsky in her concerts. But she was Stalin’s favourite pianist.

In Shostakovich's words [From Shostakovich, Testimony]
"In his final years … Stalin didn’t let anyone in to see him for days at a time. He listened to the radio a lot. Once Stalin called the Radio Committee, where the administration was, and asked if they had a record of Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 23, which had been heard on the radio the day before. “Played by Yudina,” he added. They told Stalin that of course they had. Actually, there was no record, the concert had been live. But they were afraid to say no to Stalin."

Stalin:
После взятия власти нашей партией в 1917 году и после того, как партия предприняла реальные меры по ликвидации капиталистического и помещичьего гнета, представители братских партий, восхищаясь отвагой и успехами нашей партии, присвоили ей звание “Ударной бригады” мирового революционного и рабочего движения.


After the seizure of power by our Party in 1917,
and after our Party took real measures to eliminate the yoke of capitalists and landlords, the representatives of the' fraternal parties, inspired by our daring and the success of our Party, gave it the name "Shock Brigade" of the revolutionary movement and the workers' movement of the world.

[Testimony excerpt continues]:
"Stalin demanded that they send the record with Yudina’s performance of the Mozart to his dacha. The committee panicked, but they had to do something. They called in Yudina and an orchestra and recorded that night. Everyone was shaking with fright, except for Yudina, naturally. Yudina later told me that they had to send the conductor home, he was so scared he couldn’t think. They called another conductor, who trembled and got everything mixed up, confusing the orchestra. Only a third conductor was in any shape to finish the recording. Anyway, the record was ready by morning. They made one single copy and sent it to Stalin. They say that her recording of the Mozart was on the record player when the leader and teacher was found dead in his dacha. I was the last thing he had listened to."