Shostakovich Against Stalin: The War Symphonies (1997)
From Hannah Arendt’s “On Violence”:
Nowhere is the self-defeating factor in the victory of violence over power more evident than in the use of terror to maintain domination, about whose weird successes and eventual failures we know perhaps more than any generation before us. Terror is not the same as violence; it is, rather, the form of government that comes into being when violence, having destroyed all power, does not abdicate but, on the contrary, remains in full control. … The decisive difference between totalitarian domination, based on terror, and tyrannies and dictatorships, established by violence, is that the former turns not only against its enemies but against it friends and supporters as well, being afraid of all power, even the power of its friends. The climax of terror is reached when the police state begins to devour its own children, when yesterday’s executioner becomes today’s victim. There exist now a great many plausible explanations for the de-Stalinization of Russia—none, I believe, so compelling as the realization by the Stalinist functionaries themselves that a continuation of the regime would lead, not to insurrection, against which terror is indeed the best safeguard, but to paralysis of the whole country.
I’ve quoted Arendt at length here because no words of mine could sum up so well the reality depicted in this first-rate documentary on the amazing music and precarious political situation of the twentieth century’s greatest composers of symphonies.
This clip is not actually from this documentary, but uses some the same imagery to accompany this movement of the 8th symphony.
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