The Real Tragedy of Stalin's Deadly Rule (1922-53)

I must've been in my 20s when I first heard the famous Fifth Symphony of Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich. This disturbing and dramatic piece was the subject of a PBS show last nite which attempted to decipher the hidden meaning of this long lugubrious piece - with its clangs of discordant discontent - written during Stalin's reign of terror. Listen to a few bars here.

Under the paranoid Stalin, artistic freedom did not exist. All works of art whether painting or poetry or music were severely scrutinized and if found to be at cross purposes to the Revolution, the artist was either chastised or imprisoned or sent to the Gulag or executed. We here in America cannot fathom what it was like to live under such extreme repression.

While watching the show and sighing about the terrible injustices, I thought to myself, No one ever told Stalin off. His power was so supreme that no man or woman could ever corner him, sit him down and tell him what he was doing to his great nation. The human being has an innate sense of justice and very deeply wishes wrongdoers to be charged with their crimes.

Stalin never was. He died a natural death at age 74. What a tragedy.

Hitler, at least, knew he was a failure. It tormented him. He felt despair. Everything he worked for was destroyed. Hitler knew this and it shook him up. Was he in his own private agony? No matter. He put a gun to his head. He picked up a cold revolver, put it to his head and blew his brains out.

The Russians have the skull fragments today.

But Stalin got away scot-free. He had loved his mother. He had once been a little boy. Soso was his nickname. How he loved his mother. What a beautiful relationship they had. True. But his father was a brutal alcoholic. Soso was as wily as Ulysses in escaping from his father tho perhaps he turned into him later on.

Were there no assassination plots against him? Was there no other way to stop this madman from killing his own people other than waiting for him to die?

Dmitri Shostakovich escaped the censors - and remarkably the clever and cultured Stalin himself - with his Fifth Symphony. His feelings for the Russian Revolution are revealed in his music. Close your eyes and listen. Let the images of Russia roll thru your mind.