This essay is the story of how both works of art were created despite the best efforts of the Soviet authorities to prevent their release. Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky released Stalker in 1979, a film based on one section of a science-fiction novel called Roadside Picnic, written by two brothers, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.
As Britain and the United States creep ever closer to a censorious surveillance culture increasingly resembling the USSR, it is instructive to look at one particular work of art and the story of its creation. In terms of what it did to culture, there is no better example of its nihilism than its treatment of artists, although paradoxically, great art still emerged from this failed human experiment despite, rather than because of, the Soviet authorities. The USSR’s fanatical Communist ideology crushed the spirit of its people and ultimately murdered millions of them. The Soviet Union was a wretched curse on mankind and, as with traditional curses, it may not be at an end. Because with film we can go straight into the mind of the masses!” - Jonathan Bowden, “ Hans-Jürgen Syberberg: Leni Riefenstahl’s Heir” why he’d been spared, Stalin said, “Shostakovich can write film music.
Every musician that Shostakovich was at the Moscow Conservatory with in one particular year was shot.
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