Tikhon Khrennikov
Tikhon Khrennikov was the youngest of ten children, born into a family of horse traders in the town of Yelets, Oryol Governorate, Russian Empire (now in Lipetsk Oblast in central Russia).
Typical was his speech during a discussion in February 1936 concerning Pravda articles "Muddle Instead of Music" and "Balletic Falsity": The resolution on 23rd April 1932 appealed to the consciousness of the Soviet artist.
[...] After the enthusiasm for western tendencies came an attraction to simplicity, influenced by composing for the theatre, where simple, expressive music was required.
[4] Together with other representatives of Soviet culture (Nikolay Chelyapov, Nikolai Myaskovsky, Nikolay Chemberdzhi, Sergei Vasilenko, Victor Bely, Alexander Veprik, Aram Khachaturian, Boris Shekhter, M. Starodokamsky, Georgy Khubov, Vano Muradeli, Vladimir Yurovsky and Lev Kulakovsky), Khrennikov signed the statement welcoming "a sentence of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union, passed on traitors against the motherland, fascist hirelings, such as Tukhachevsky, Yakir and others".
[5] Having "adopted the optimistic, dramatic and unabashedly lyrical style favored by Soviet leaders",[6] Khrennikov shot to fame in 1941, with the "Song of Moscow" ("Свинарка и пастух", meaning "Swineherd and Shepherd") from his music score for the popular Soviet film They Met in Moscow,[7] for which he was awarded the Stalin Prize.
As one of the main speakers, Khrennikov backed the party line, and attacked all three of the greatest composers present, Dmitri Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev and Khachaturian.
Years later, he defended his behaviour by telling a BBC correspondent: "They told me - they forced me - to read out that speech attacking Shostakovich and Prokofiev.
Extant evidence demonstrates that Veprik spent four years in a prison camp and Mieczysław Weinberg was released in June 1953 because of Stalin's death.
[13] In 1949, Khrennikov officially attacked the composer Alexander Lokshin, using formulations of one of Stalin's ideologists,[further explanation needed] Pavel Apostolov.
In his speech Khrennikov contrasted Lokshin's "modernist" style with the bylina Stepan Razin's Dream by Galina Ustvolskaya, which he considered an ideal example of true national art.
At the same time, Sviatoslav Prokofiev noted the typical logic of the Soviet functionary: sometimes Khrennikov could help if it was not dangerous for his own position and career.
[16][dubious – discuss] The ideological campaigns of 1948–49 against musical formalism were directly connected with the offensive against "rootless cosmopolitans," which formed a part of the state anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union that flourished after the Second World War.
Some of Khrennikov's statements mentioned above are included in the 2004 documentary Notes interdites: scènes de la vie musicale en Russie Soviétique (English title: The Red Baton) by Bruno Monsaingeon.
In it Khrennikov denied the suggestion that he was at the heart of the criticism of composers such as Prokofiev and Shostakovich,[clarification needed] though he expressed pride that he "was Stalin's Commissar.
"[26] Khrennikov had to take part in repressions against Shostakovich during the enforcement of the "Party line" in music, but unlike the leadership of the Soviet Writers Union, he was never involved in political reporting on his colleagues.
Khrennikov not only survived Stalin's repressive reign but lived in comfort under the succession of Soviet rulers and post-Soviet presidents that followed: Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko, Gorbachev, Yeltsin and Putin.
Khrennikov's long and improbable career began in 1948, when Stalin personally picked him to lead the Union of Soviet Composers.
His first accomplishment on the job was an attack on abstract, "formalist" music in a speech at the First Congress of Composers in 1948, two months after the infamous Resolution of the Central Committee that condemned the "formalism" of Shostakovich, Prokofiev and others.
