The Great Friendship

The Great Friendship (Russian: Великая дружба, romanized: Velikaya druzhba; also called The Extraordinary Commissar) is a 1947 opera by Vano Muradeli, to a libretto by Georgi Mdivani.

The opera was first mooted in 1941 as a homage to Sergo Ordzhonikidze, a leading Bolshevik revolutionary, later a member of the CPSU Politburo and long-time close associate of Stalin, who in 1937 had shot himself anticipating arrest from his former friend, but whose death had at the time been given out as caused by heart failure.

During the Russian Civil War, Ordzhonikidze, by birth (like Stalin) a Georgian, was a commissar for Ukraine, fighting the White Army under Anton Denikin.

Other performances were arranged at other cities including Leningrad, Gorki (now Nizhny-Novgorod), Yerevan, Ulan-Ude, Frunze (now Bishkek), Novosibirsk, Riga and Vilnius.

Murtaz is on the Bolshevik side; he dies heroically stopping a bullet aimed at the Commissar by the opera's villain, the White officer Pomazov.

[14] The Resolution named six composers (Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev, Nikolai Miaskovsky, Aram Khachaturian, Vissarion Shebalin and Gavriil Popov) as 'formalists', damaging their careers and effectively preventing their music being programmed until they 'repented'.

A new decree was issued on 28 March 1958 by the Central Committee, entitled "On the Correction of Errors in the Evaluation of The Great Friendship, Bogdan Khmelnitsky and From All My Heart" (two other works which had fallen foul of Zhdanov's campaigns).