The Great Friendship

The Great Friendship (Russian: Великая дружба) is a 1947 opera by Vano Muradeli, to a libretto by Georgi Mdivani. It was premiered in Donetsk (then known as Stalino) on 28 September 1947 and given its Moscow premiere at the Bolshoi Theatre, on 7 November 1947. Joseph Stalin attended a performance at the Bolshoi on 5 January 1948, and strongly disapproved of the opera. This led to a significant purge, often referred to as the Zhdanovshchina, of the musical life of the Soviet Union.

The opera was first mooted in 1941 as a homage to Sergo Ordzhonikidze, a leading Bolshevik revolutionary, later a member of the CPSU Politburo and long-time close associate of Stalin, who in 1937 had shot himself anticipating arrest from his former friend, but whose death had at the time been given out as caused by heart failure. During the Russian Civil War, Ordzhonikidze, by birth (like Stalin) a Georgian, was a commissar for Ukraine, fighting the White Army under Anton Denikin. The opera, which is set during Ordzhonikidze's campaign against Denikin, appeared in the 1941 workplan of the Bolshoi Theatre with Muradeli named as composer; it was at that time named The Special Commissar (Чрезвычайный комиссар).

Muradeli, who had himself been present at a meeting with Ordzhonikidze in Gori in 1921, had himself proposed the idea of the opera, the storyline of which also drew from Ordzhonikidze's account of his campaign in the Caucasus in his book The Path of a Bolshevik. On 22 January 1947 the opera, under the name of The Special Commissar, appeared in Order no. 40 published by the Arts Committee of the Council of People's Commissars in the list of works intended to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the October Revolution (7 November 1917) The title of the opera was changed in May 1947, (possibly at the suggestion of the censorship authorities) to The Great Friendship, referring to the friendship between the many peoples of the Soviet Union.

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