London, 24 September 2009

The diplomat Alan Brooke Turner cmg (1926–2013) was British Cultural Attache in Moscow, 1962–5.

What was the context of Britten's first visit to the Soviet Union?

Much, but not everything, changed when Khrushchev came to power in the aftermath of Stalin's death. To people living in the Soviet Union this was perhaps the first moment when they could feel that, after the appalling privations and sacrifices of the Second World War, they could hope for a peaceful development of East–West relations. The arrival of foreign orchestras, musicians, actors and, rather more rarely, foreign films in Moscow and Leningrad began to create the sense that the selfimposed isolation of the Soviet Union from the cultural life of the Western world was coming to an end. The guardians of Communist orthodoxy, by accepting in the Soviet Union the best of what Western culture had to offer, had shown to the public, and especially the intelligentsia, that in these areas, contacts with the West were acceptable. Before I had arrived in the Soviet Union, the Royal Ballet had paid a triumphantly successful visit; and during my three-and-a-half years as Cultural Attache there were visits by the Royal Shakespeare Theatre (with Paul Schofield playing King Lear) and the National Theatre (with Laurence Olivier playing Othello), as well as great companies from other countries, such as the Komische Oper from Berlin. All these performances were immensely popular; people not only stood for hours in hopes of obtaining a returned ticket, but even attempted to gain entry to concert halls and theatres by crawling up the ventilation shafts.

But for me, the two most memorable events were a performance of Bach's Mass in B Minor in the Great Hall of the Conservatory in Moscow by the Robert Shaw Chorale from the United States. At the end of the performance I noticed that many people in the audience, especially the elderly, were weeping. It dawned on me that because of the campaign against the Church, which was still being continued, this was the first occasion many would have had to hear this great work. The other event was the return of Stravinsky to Moscow in 1962.