A Contribution

At the inception of this blog, I said that I would dedicate my daily writings to all the things that I love; family, faith, home...and cake. Nothing that I have written about could be considered particularly weighty and certainly none of it is intellectual. And yet a big part of my family life involves debate and discussion of heavier issues. Each night after our daughter has fallen asleep, my husband and I talk. And it's not unusual for us to glance at the clock after what seems like a few minutes only to discover that we have been talking for hours. Politics, religion, society, economics...nothing is off topic. I have learnt so much from him and I continue to daily seek his opinion on so many issues that crop up, not only in our lives, but in the wider world.

Long before I started this online 'diary', I had been somewhat pestering my husband (very gently!) to put electronic pen to paper and contribute some of his thoughts and ideas to the world wide web. Needless to say, he has neither enough time nor enough inclination to start his own blog just yet, but I have managed to persuade him to contribute a post to mine regarding a documentary film he saw last week which piqued his interest.

The following represents this other side of my home-life. A cake recipe it is not! But it is just as much a part of my every day life as anything I have written. Over to you Hubby...


'Shostakovich Against Stalin - The War Symphonies' : A Review

Larry Weinstein, by his own admission and definition 'a middle-class Canadian' seems an unlikely candidate to undertake the making of this film - a journey through one of Russia's most famous composer's idealogical battles with one of world's most dictatorial madmen.

There is much to recommend this documentary film, made in 1997 before the trend of 'docudrama' and its attempts to recreate history rather than tell the story straight, but there is a sense of detachment from the subject material that sit a little uneasily. The film combines elements of a history lesson with orchestral performance and it can be unclear at times wether we are meant to be listening to the music or getting the message about Stalin's purges. Yes, the music was the means employed by Shostakovich to convey his dislike of Stalin's regime and so both are closely related but the conductor Valery Gergiev's monologues about the symphonies add nothing to the story of the purges or the Nazi seige of Leningrad in which Shostakovich was trapped. The detachment continues in the interviews with the friends and family of Shostakovich himself. These lack the warmth of a film maker really trying to tell what is, after all, the story of their opression.

There are however several moments which do genuinely bring home the terror of what ordinary Russians experienced during the 1930's and 40's. The siege of Leningrad lasted 872 days and killed over 1 million people, Nazi Germany had the city surrounded and cut off almost all supplies of food, water, and energy. Many were starving and many died as a result. That an orchestra was able to motivate itself through this horror to put on a performance of Symphony No. 7 is truly amazing, even though many members of the orchestra had died and the remaining members would clearly have been both terrorised and in mourning.

The way in which Shostakovich was targetted by the Stalin's security apparatus, presumably for the purposes of being 'purged', was also highly enlightening. In many ways similar to Josef K's treatment in Kafka's 'The Trial', Shostakovich was summoned, interviewed, released, summoned again and so forth - we understand without being told on what grounds he was being subjected to this 'judicial' process. In a bizarre twist of fate, we are told that Shostakovich only escaped imprisonment (or worse) because the man investigating him was himself being investigated and is arrested the day before he intends to make Shostakovich disappear. Shostakovich had even said goodbye to his family. It amply demonstrates the way in which the secret police seem to have behaved in many of the 'communist' experiments in history.

The archive footage of Stalin himself is equally chilling, like something out of a dystopian film, except that we know this was no fiction. Things are relieved somewhat by the inclusion of extracts from Mikhail Chiaureli's "Fall Of Berlin" for which Shostakovich provided the score. In this film, under Stalin's ultimate direction, the story of World War II is retold in the manner in which Stalin would have wanted it. If the truth wasn't so truly awful it would be funny, the way in which Stalin has himself portrayed in iconic fashion as the saviour of Russia and the Russian people. The actor playing Stalin is so wooden, I wondered if he was simply too scared to act?

It seems by providing film scores, at which he was considered rather good, Shostakovich had made himself useful to the Soviet authorities and he ultimately did not suffer any physical harm. Most of the persecution appears to have been pyschological, denounced as "against the people" on two occasions by the Soviet Central Committee and forced to write more 'pleasing' film scores.

This leads to the other problematic area of the film, namely that to show how terrible the purges were for Shostakovich and to focus only on that ignores how much worse things would have been for ordinary Russians. Shostakovich was not an ordinary Russian. His family were educated, professional, privileged in some ways. Identified as a prodigy at eight years of age, Shostakovich's path was not one of triumph over adversity. In many ways, Shostakovich's public presence and his popularity would have made it more difficult for Stalin to persecute him; at least compared with a Joe Nobody who could be executed for simply saying a few words against the party. Shostakovich was certainly brave to create 'unpleasing' music, but that bravery and his misfortune should be viewed in context.

This is an interesting film, not perfect by any means and it perhaps doesn't live up to its full potential, but if you like music and 20th century history it is definitely worth a look.