Their author was an opportunistic journalist named David Zaslavski, a former bandist (a member of the Jewish socialist political movement) who was eager to show his loyalty to the party and to Stalin. Shostakovich knew him and probably knew that he wrote the review. Zaslavski used what was paid to them to pay the Communist Party’s dues.
When Stalin was disgusted and finished the Bolshoi performance of the opera, Kerzhentsev shot an arrow at his rival Alexander Shcherbakov. Shcherbakov, in a letter to Stalin, praised the original work of “Lady Macbeth” in Leningrad. Stalin redirected the letter to Kerzhentsev, and Kerzhentsev’s arrow hit Shostakovich.
Zaslavsky’s takedown of “Lady Macbeth” is vulgarly imaginative, centered around Shostakovich’s desire to “tickle the perverted tastes of bourgeois audiences with convulsive, shrieking, neurasthenic music.” is. It “ratters, moans, and gasps to render love scenes as naturally as possible.” And Zaslavski adds, “‘Love’ is smeared throughout the opera in its most vulgar form.”
There are no love scenes, and the circus-like music of the sexual assault in Act 1 links musically with the score’s other episodes of brutality. He also did not mention that the US “bourgeois audience” did not hear all of the gasps. To accommodate the home, the boudoir scenes were hidden behind curtains.
For Stalin, Zaslavsky served his intended purpose. “Yes, I remember Pravda’s article,” he told a cultural insider. “It gave the right policy.” The journal of the Union of Soviet Composers hastily reprinted Zaslavsky’s article, devoting several issues to denouncing Shostakovich’s “leftism.”
There are conflicting accounts of Shostakovich’s reaction to the scandal. Previously, the Bolshoi dancers recalled him playing the score to “The Bright Stream” while laughing like a child. He then panicked by saying, “I’ll do everything they want me to do” and showed up at the theater looking for his score. He was frightened, but he knew for himself and for Russia that his art had to become like Pravda itself, that opera, ballet and other art had to be read in black and white. He seemed angry that he didn’t.