For those of you who march to a different drummer:
Biographers of Prokofiev love to note his having died at sixty-one on March 5, 1953, within perhaps an hour of Stalin’s death, although the timing relies on official Soviet accounts that can’t be checked. Sovetskoye iskusstvo waited thirteen days to publish on page 4 its obituary of the composer. Alfred Schnittke, his younger colleague, who watched the funeral procession, later recalled how,
along an almost deserted street that ran parallel to the seething mass hysterically mourning the passing of Stalin, there moved in the opposite direction a small group of people bearing on their shoulders the coffin of the greatest Russian composer of the time…. To move against the tide in those days was hopeless. Yet even then there was—just as in earlier ages—the possibility of a choice between two decisions, only one of which was right.
There was a choice, that’s true, but few then had the audacity to make it. Fifteen people witnessed the interment.