Just how malignant was Tikhon Khrennikov, longtime head of the Soviet Composers' Union, who died last month at the age of 94? Can anything be said in his favor? Two recent pieces put the great denouncer in a different light. An obituary in the Economist paints a jarringly sympathetic picture, arguing that Khrennikov worked privately to protect composers even as he lambasted them publicly. The salient point is that on Khrennikov's watch composers generally suffered far less than their counterparts in other artists' unions, especially the Writers' Union. There are some tenuous assertions here, particularly concerning Khrennikov's alleged support of Alfred Schnittke, but it makes you stop and think. As does a long piece in the Boston Globe by Jeremy Eichler, who interviewed Khrennikov in 2001. Declining the temptation to render a quick judgment, Eichler leads the reader deep inside the apparatchik's murky world.
The big question with Khrennikov is whether the composers would have been better or worse off without him. His political savvy might have prevented worse fates; then again, the leading composers managed to survive the Terror of the late thirties without Khrennikov's help. (Shostakovich was no idiot when it came to dealing with authority.) Perhaps, as someone who knew Khrennikov suggested to me, the vagueness of musical language was the true barrier against the kind of punishment that was meted out to writers such as Solzhenitsyn, Grossman, and Zoshchenko. In which case Khrennikov did nothing that many others might not have done just as well, perhaps even with a touch more humanity. After all, the major Soviet composers may have eluded execution and the gulags, but they tended not to live long. Shostakovich died at 68; Prokofiev at 61; Schnittke at 63....
