Michel Krielaars’ The Sound of Utopia: Musicians in the Time of Stalin is a fascinating look at the perils of making music under the maniacal Soviet dictator. We know much about the broken lives and ...

The great Soviet composers who defied Stalin’s tyranny With The Sound of Utopia, Michael Krielaars offers a chattily accessible survey of the musicians who lived beholden to the KGB’s whims 78 Gift ...

A revelatory account of the composers and performers whose lives were determined by the whims of a dictator The fact that Joseph Stalin loved music and believed it mattered was both a blessing and a ...

‘Yudina really was a “symbol of nonconformism” among Soviet musicians, dressed like a nun and in the habit of speaking out’ Not so long ago this would surely have been a different kind of book. It ...