The Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party write, in their scathing resolution on Muradeli’s “Great Friendship,” that the opera is not only “vicious” but further, “inartistic” in both its “music and subject matter,” (Sovetskaia muzyka, No. 1 (1948), pp. 3-8.) due to Muradeli’s adherence to formalism. They identify the opera as oppressive due to the musical component’s decentralization of melody, the complexity of its harmony (primarily in Muradeli’s emphatic use of dissonance), and its lack of USSR-specific signifiers inside and outside the idiom of opera (folk-derived melodies, motifs, tunes). Simultaneously, they articulate that Muradeli creates a false narrative of an adversarial relationship between Russia and the people of the Caucus region. They conclude by accounting for “the failure of Muradeli’s opera [as] the result of the formalistic path which he has followed–a path which is false and injurious to the creative work of the Soviet composer.” (Sovetskaia muzyka, No. 1 (1948), pp. 3-8.) If, as the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party note, the fault lies in the actions of the composers and in the music critics’ support of this formalist music, the “oppressive” and “vicious” qualities of this specific piece point to a larger societal and cultural issue for the State. I’m curious how, given the opera was in itself unsuccessful by many accounts, we can consider the nuances of its failure in the larger context of anti-formalism / soviet realism. What formalist qualities are identifiable in the opera, and can these be considered separate from (and not augmented by) its libretto? Or is the Central Committee identifying its libretto as a component of the piece’s formalism? Is this opera more than just an easy target which incorporates multiple factors the State cannot tolerate? Does this point to a larger issue of designating certain musics as oppressive to “the people” when in reality, there was a large group supporting and cultivating Russian formalism?