Tsarist Russia, for all its negative traits, had redeeming features. It gave rise to some of the greatest music, dance, and literature in human history — a flowering of the kind now smothered by Putin’s totalitarian dictatorship.
Its literary scene produced some of the world’s greatest-ever poets and novelists — Pushkin, Lermontov, Tiutchev, and others. Where is today’s Gogol, whose crazy stories lampooned even the tsarist bureaucracy?
Several major Russian poets continued working in Soviet times. Vladimir Mayakovsky begged the government to “make me a part of the Five-Year Plan.” But when controls tightened, he committed suicide, as had his more romantic comrade Sergei Yesenin.
One of Stalin’s favorite writers, Mikhail Sholokhov, won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1965 for his novels about the Civil War. In 1958 Boris Pasternak had also won a Nobel prize for Doctor Zhivago, although the Khrushchev regime kept him from accepting it.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn won in 1970 for his novels exposing life in the Gulag. Expelled from the USSR in 1974, he moved to Vermont, though he later returned to post-communist Russia.
One of the leading dissident poets from the Khrushchev era, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, departed post-Soviet Russia to teach and recite in the US and was the most vital — most alive — person I have known. He told me Russian audiences no longer appreciated poetry and, in the 1990s, could not afford books.
What has happened to the music scene that gave humanity some of its greatest music, dance, and theater?
Stalin smothered two giant composers, Prokofiev and Shostakovich. Prokofiev wrote Romeo and Juliet in 1935 and got it produced in 1940, risking censure for degenerate modernism. Defying official and popular anti-Semitism, Shostakovich managed to play his Symphony No. 13 to accompany Yevtushenko’s poem Babi Yar in 1962.
One of the world’s greatest cellists, Mstislav Rostropovich, provided refuge for Solzhenitsyn in his dacha but was then banned from performing except in provincial towns. The cellist and Galina Vishnevskaya, his singer wife, escaped to the West.
Russian choreographers and dancers — Diaghilev, Balanchine, Nureyev, Baryshnikov, and Natalia Osipova — also transformed ballet from Paris to New York.
When I visited Moscow’s Tretyakov Art Gallery in 1958, the works of Chagall, Kandinsky, and other avant-garde painters were kept in dark storage rooms where visitors needed a lantern to see them. Now, they are displayed, in part to attract tourists. So are works by the late dissident artist, Oskar Rabin, who took exile in Paris. A sculpture by Ernst Neizvestny still graces the tomb of Nikita Khrushchev, even though the artist moved to New York.
Stalin and his successors suppressed, killed, or drove into exile many of the Soviet Union’s best and brightest. Andrei Sakharov, the father of the Soviet H-bomb, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975 “for his struggle for human rights in the Soviet Union, for disarmament and cooperation between all nations.”
Kremlin rulers have strangled science as well as the arts. Solzhenitsyn’s novel In The First Circle recalled how Stalin imprisoned scientists in gulag workshops and demanded they improve hard power technologies.
In the same way, Putin’s war on Ukraine has driven thousands of Russia’s best and brightest into exile. In 2024 the regime sentenced a founder of Russia’s internet, Aleksey Soldatov, to two years in a labor camp — a possible death sentence for a 72-year-old with serious health issues.
Not all is lost, however. The lyric soprano Aida Garifullina, from Tatarstan, trained in Nuremberg and has become a star on the stage of the Vienna State Opera as well as at the Marinsky and Bolshoi theatres. She has paired with Placido Domingo and Andrea Bocelli in Italy’s concert arenas and has been welcomed in many Chinese venues.
She says she feels best with her family in Kazan. She reminds us what the Russian Federation could be if it tapped the cultures of its subject nations instead of using their young men as cannon fodder.
Walter Clemens is an Associate at, the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University, and Professor Emeritus, Department of Political Science, Boston University. He wrote Blood Debts: What Putin and Xi Owe Their Victims (Washington DC: Westphalia Press, 2023).
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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