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The awful calamity of Stalin being a music lover

The dictator obsessed over new recordings and was a frequent visitor to the Bolshoi; but he treated even the greatest musicians arbitrarily, consigning many to the Gulag for no reason

18 January 2025

9:00 AM

18 January 2025

9:00 AM

The Sound of Utopia: Musicians in the Time of Stalin Michel Krielaars

Pushkin Press, pp.336, 25

At around 9 p.m. on 5 March 1953 Sergei Prokofiev died of a brain haemorrhage on the sofa of his Moscow flat. He was 61, and had struggled for years with ill health. He had long complained of pain in his soul. Less than an hour later, the source of that pain, Joseph Stalin, died of a heart attack in his dacha on the outskirts of Moscow.

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