[1][3] The cause for his dismissal, a printed denunciation by the Union of Soviet Composers and an official censure was anti-Semitism, conducted under the bureaucratic veneer of a campaign against "cosmpolitalism.
"[4] According to musicologists Judith Kuhn and Richard Taruskin, this campaign, which included the murder of virtually every Jewish cultural activist over a five–year period, became the first instance of anti-Semitism as "official government policy in the Soviet Union.
Zhitomirsky's presentation at the Leningrad conference of 1968, Gojowy adds, was similarly colored and shed new light on the history of Soviet music.
[5] At a June 1929 meeting of the RAPM, where members denounced Shostakovich's opera The Nose for "formalism" and "anti–Soviet escapism", Zhitomirsky reportedly pointed his fist at the composer and said, "If he does not accept the falsity of his path, then his work will inevitably find itself at a dead end.
[7] Nikolskaya says Zhitomirsky eventually portrayed Shostakovich as an artist "living in internal exile, one who totally rejected the existing system and repudiated everything Soviet.
In a monograph on the composer, Zhitomirsky emphasized the quartet's "rich and multi-faceted content" and called it "an entire world of romantic feelings, where the beauty of bright, 'naive' daydreams exists side-by-side with austere patriotic passion, with grief and heroism.