Episode Details

Dmitri Shostakovich slept every night with a packed suitcase by his bed, waiting for the secret police to come. He composed some of the greatest symphonies of the twentieth century while living under a regime that could have sent him to a labor camp for writing the wrong chord. The midnight elevator — listening for it to stop on his floor — became his nightly ritual of dread.

This episode traces Shostakovich from his prodigy childhood in St. Petersburg through Stalin's denunciation, his years of composing in terror, and the debate over whether his music was submission or coded resistance.

• Stalin personally denounced his opera Lady Macbeth in 1936, nearly ending his career and possibly his life
• He slept with a packed suitcase by his bed expecting arrest during the Great Terror
• His Seventh Symphony became a symbol of resistance during the Siege of Leningrad
• Scholars still debate whether his later works contain hidden anti-Soviet messages