With help from Alexander Fadeyev and Sergey Balasanian, Prokofiev was granted a commission for his oratorio from the children's programming division of the Radio Information Committee.

[2] By 1947, the number of distinctions and prizes he earned were unmatched in the history of Soviet music, on top of which were several foreign honors, including a gold medal from the Royal Philharmonic Society.

[3] On January 5, 1948, Joseph Stalin and members of the Politburo attended the Bolshoi Theatre for a performance of the opera The Great Friendship by the Georgian composer Vano Muradeli.

He immediately directed Andrei Zhdanov to investigate the opera, which led to a wider campaign against musical formalism,[5] during which Prokofiev emerged as one of the main targets.

On February 10, Prokofiev and five other Soviet composers were censured by the Politburo in their 1948 Anti-Formalist Resolution on Music, which resulted in the banning of a number of his works, including previously lauded scores such as the Sixth and Eighth piano sonatas.

[6][7] According to Marina Frolova-Walker, the punishment meted out to Prokofiev was arguably the harshest of all the censured composers, with its "devastating effect" leading to the "catastrophic deterioration of his health".

[8] He was out of official favor for a longer period of time than the other composers named in the resolution, an outcome which the failed reception of his opera The Story of a Real Man aggravated.

[13] Prokofiev later explained in an article he wrote for Izvestia in 1951 that the oratorio's theme of peace "sprang from life itself" and his observations of "scenes from everyday Soviet life": [On Guard for Peace] tells of the grim days of World War II, of the tears of mothers and orphans, of towns swept by fire, of the terrible trials that fell to the lot of our people; of Stalingrad and the victory over the enemy; of the radiant joy of creative labor, of the happy childhood of our children.

[19] Prokofiev's doctors warned him against taking on any more work, but he persisted as he hoped his proposal for an oratorio would result in a paid official commission from the Committee on Arts Affairs.

[25] Prokofiev kept working intermittently during his convalescence, preparing what ultimately became On Guard for Peace while simultaneously revising and editing the piano score for his ballet The Tale of the Stone Flower.

The film's depictions of Mikhail Glinka's professional failures led Prokofiev to reflect on the neglect of his own operas; he ultimately declined Aleksandrov's offer.

[29] Ehrenburg's libretto—which consisted of twelve sections and set the oratorio in a hypothetical Soviet Union devastated by preemptive nuclear strikes launched by the United States with the assistance of NATO—shared similar themes with his recent novel, The Ninth Wave.

The libretto described Western financiers celebrating the North Atlantic Treaty and "traders of death" goading for nuclear warfare, but these are ultimately thwarted by a global coalition of nations led by the Soviet Union.

[13] Fadeyev supervised the project in order to ensure that the pacifist and militarist themes in the oratorio were agreeably balanced; Prokofiev requested alterations to the libretto from him, not Marshak.

On August 28, Prokofiev himself had a medical emergency: his wife returned from an outing to find him laying on the couch feeling dizzy, bleeding profusely from his nose, and with low blood pressure.

The conductor suggested the addition of a populist number for boy soprano at a crucial dramatic point in On Guard for Peace and releasing doves during the premiere performance.

The latter was rejected by the management of the House of the Unions, the venue chosen for the premiere, but the former was accepted; in response, Marshak wrote the poems "A Letter From an Italian Boy" and "A Lesson in One's Native Language".

"A Letter From an Italian Boy" was about a schoolboy who decried the shipment of armaments from the United States to Italy; "A Lesson in One's Native Language", which Prokofiev chose to set, described schoolchildren in a Moscow classroom writing the phrase "Peace to all peoples of the world" over and over again on a chalkboard.

[43] Even after acquiescing to numerous suggestions and demands that would make On Guard for Peace more acceptable to the political environment of the time, Prokofiev privately worried whether the audience would respond positively to it.

In spite of the prize committee's approval of both scores, Vladimir Kruzhkov [ru] from Agitprop disagreed with the suitability of awarding On Guard for Peace, saying that "in many episodes the music does not fit the text and contains elements of formalism".

[52] Its success made possible subsequent commissions from the Radio Information Committee that helped to further repair Prokofiev's reputation, including The Meeting of the Volga and the Don and the Seventh Symphony.

'"[53] A column by John O'Donnell published in the New York Daily News dismissed the oratorio as "Kremlin music" and criticized the creation of a "party-line" work so soon after the start of the Korean War.

Nell Lawson, reviewing for the Buffalo News a recording of the oratorio conducted by Gennady Rozhdestvensky, described it as "great music by a composer who had his own travail at the hands of the leaders of his day and a monument to his bravery".

[57] Linda Norris, writing for the Biggs News, praised the oratorio's tone as "positive, with an optimistic spirit conveyed in the voices of children", and added that the "music [was] stirring and the words touching", although she warned her readers against being "completely taken in" by its political message.

[58] Similarly, Jack Rudolph in the Appleton Post-Crescent wrote that the oratorio was "powerful propaganda" and that "as long the piece is recognized for what it is it can be appreciated and enjoyed on musical terms".

[60]In 1999, one writer reviewing a recording conducted by Yuri Temirkanov called the oratorio "Stalinist era kitsch at its most egregious",[61] while another said that the work "makes the prospect of world harmony seem downright terrifying".

Although he said the oratorio "may be legitimately classified as serving the official ideology of the Soviet Union", he listed commonalities the score shared with earlier works such as Peter and the Wolf, The Love for Three Oranges, and the Scythian Suite.

[63] In his book on socialist realism, Musik im Zeitgeschehen, Ernst Hermann Meyer cited On Guard for Peace as a key example of how the 1948 Anti-Formalist Resolution on Music had a beneficial effect on Prokofiev.

Simon Morrison echoed Schwarz's criticisms, adding that he felt Mira Mendelson had missed the "obvious point" that the score's "paleness is the direct result of bureaucratic compromise".

[40] Tom Service, reviewing for The Guardian a live 2003 performance of On Guard for Peace conducted by Vladimir Ashkenazy, wrote that it was "Communist bravado on [a grand] scale" singled out the "Lullaby" movement as a "moment that encapsulates the contradictions of Prokofiev's music, as this simple and beautiful melody pays homage to Stalin's murderous regime".