Can great art be produced in a police state? Josif Stalin ran one of the most oppressive regimes in world history. Nevertheless, Stalinist Russia produced an outpouring of artistic works of immense power — from the poems of Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam to the opera Peter and the Wolf, the film Alexander Nevsky, and the novels The Master and Margarita and Doctor Zhivago.
More than a dozen great artists were visible enough for Stalin to take an interest in them — which meant he chose whether they were to live in luxury and be publicly honored or to be sent to the Lubyanka for torture and execution. Journalist and novelist Andy McSmith brings together the stories of these artists — including Isaac Babel, Boris Pasternak, Dmitri Shostakovich, and many others — revealing how they pursued their art often at great personal risk.
