Conference Agenda

In early 1930s Soviet Georgia, a lawyer for the Tbilisi Opera House uncovered a case of embezzlement involving fraudulent royalty payments authorized by the opera house’s administration. Following an audit, the lawyer, Giorgi Zhordania, reported his findings to the Georgian SSR, resulting in a trial before the Supreme Court of Georgia. Though justice prevailed, the trial had negative consequences for Zhordania. He faced harassment from the accused administration, which he documented in appeals to the Central Committee of the Communist Party and in a pointed exposé titled "Dead Souls and Living Marauders," published in the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda. This document provides a rare insider account of systemic corruption in Soviet cultural institutions.

This paper situates Zhordania’s legal battle and its fallout within the broader context of Soviet cultural policy and the precarious economic realities of composers in the early Soviet years. Leading Georgian composers Zakaria Paliashvili, Meliton Balanchivadze, and Kote Potskhverashvili, who supported Zhordania in his trial against the opera house, also corresponded with him about financial malfeasance and its effect on Soviet—and non-Russian—composers. In particular, Paliashvili’s reluctance to share scores with opera houses outside Georgia and his repeated struggles to secure royalties for performances in Moscow point to a culture of artistic exploitation. As champions of Georgian national opera, Paliashvili, Balanchivadze, and Potskhverashvili were deeply invested in preserving and furthering the Georgian musical tradition, and their experiences navigating Soviet bureaucracy reflected broader tensions between national artistic identity and state control.

Drawing on Zhordania’s previously unseen trial notes, court documents, letters to Soviet officials, and personal correspondence with Georgian composers, this study illuminates the relationship between state power and cultural production in the Caucasus in the early Soviet years. The reality was not a pleasant one; composers on the periphery of the Soviet empire endured racial discrimination, impoverishment, and exploitation, all in the name of creating a national music tradition that ultimately only supported Soviet power.

In 1948, Polish folk revivalist Tadeusz Sygietyński founded the Mazowsze State Folk Song and Dance Ensemble. As Poland worked to reconstruct and modernize its musical culture after the devastation of World War II, Mazowsze played a pivotal role by staging stylized performances of Polish folk music and dance to restore and promote Polish folk culture. However, Sygietyński created the ensemble under Poland’s Soviet-aligned Communist government at the height of Stalinist influence. As a political institution, Mazowsze was tasked with propagating a Polish cultural identity rooted in Soviet socialism by deploying the state-sponsored aesthetic of socialist realism, an aesthetic ideology seemingly at odds with cultural modernization and progressivism. While Mazowsze’s state sponsorship enabled its participation in Poland’s postwar cultural reconstruction, it also confined the ensemble within an ideological frame associated with the regressive politics of the Stalinist era.

In this paper, I argue that the reconstruction of Polish culture after World War II and throughout the Cold War occurred not only in opposition to socialist realism, but also through it. Scholars including Lisa Cooper Vest and David Tompkins have largely focused on Polish postwar cultural reconstruction through high-art musical genres, framing it primarily through narratives of resistance against the socialist realist model. In contrast, there has been little scholarly attention directed toward analyzing the cultural work performed by state-sponsored folk ensembles like Mazowsze in the reconstruction of Polish culture throughout the Cold War. Drawing on Pauline Fairclough’s notion of the Soviet middlebrow, I contend that Mazowsze constituted an inherently modernizing force in postwar Poland both through and despite the ensemble’s instrumentalization by the Communist state and strict adherence to socialist realism. Through an analysis of Mazowsze’s musical repertoire, costuming, and promotional narratives throughout the Cold War, I demonstrate how state-sponsored ensembles like Mazowsze played a critical role in circulating an image of Polish culture that aligned with Poland’s own postwar cultural reconstruction rather than purely conforming to Soviet ideological models. Ultimately, this paper expands scholarly discourse on Polish Cold War music by bringing light to the role of state-sponsored ensembles like Mazowsze in shaping the postwar Polish musical identity.

As one of the luminaries of the Russian musical emigration formed in the wake of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, Nikolay Medtner makes few appearances in the historiography of Soviet music. Yet, unlike his fellow émigrés Sergey Rachmaninoff and Igor Stravinsky, Medtner directly contributed to Soviet music life during the Civil War. He departed from Russia in 1921 to advance his career in the West and with the full intention of returning to the Soviet Union in due course. As such, Medtner’s music remained a viable and major stylistic model for aspiring Soviet composers during the relative free years of the 1920s.

Drawing on several heretofore unknown sources, I showcase the full extent of Medtner’s influence over Soviet music in both its modernist and proletarian strains. While best known today as a composer of piano pieces, Medtner was in fact the most renowned Russian composer of song in the decade before 1917, and his influence over Soviet musical life is most overt in this genre.

Despite the common assumption that Medtner music (and very name) was banned under Stalinism in the 1930s, I demonstrate that he nevertheless continued to exert a palpable and explicit influence. Medtner's settings of Pushkin’s lyrics were specifically mentioned as masterly models for the wave of composers turning to song composition in the run-up to the 1937 centennial of Pushkin's death. Medtner's willingness to set Pushkin’s more “philosophical” poetry prefigured the Party's directives of the 1930s to move away from "bourgeois" sentimental love lyrics.

Paradoxically, Medtner’s chromatically enriched, yet tonal, harmonic idiom was taken as a viable model both for the modernism of the 1920s and for the retrospective conservatism of the 1930s. In order to trace the fullness of Medtner’s Soviet legacy, I examine his 1913 setting of Pushkin’s “Zaklinanie” (“Incantation”) and demonstrate its overt influence on two utterly different Soviet settings of the same poem. Samuil Feinberg’s 1922 "Zaklinanie" serves as a case study of Medtner’s influence on one of the most celebrated modernists of the 1920s. Likewise, Yury Shaporin’s 1937 setting reveals the productive transformation of Medtner’s musical influence under Socialist Realism.