For both Russia and the West, Dmitri Shostakovich was the great Soviet composer. Born a year after the 1905 revolution, professionally trained after the Bolshevik takeover, he was the recipient of numerous state prizes, honours and awards, as well as the proscriptions and censure of 1936 and 1948. A member of the key cultural delegations to the United States in 1949 and 1959, he was a signer of articles and letters faithfully reflecting the party line, the sincere acceptor of ideological criticism. At the same time his manner distanced him from what was being said or written and seemed to undercut the actual meaning of the words. The continued quality of his best works, his setting of texts like Yevtushenko's Babi Yar, and the fact that he avoided writing the almost obligatory patriotic choruses and adulatory odes to Stalin reaffirmed an image of the composer as an artist of courage and integrity. Intensely private, mild-mannered and diffident, Shostakovich appeared a political innocent, naive, and caring for nothing but his music. Above all, the conviction of his absolute sincerity impressed western observers from the early thirties onwards.

How does Testimony affect this picture? Related to Solomon Volkov, a young musicologist now safely