Departing from where these two great composers left off, the young Russian avant garde took tonality to its limits and beyond. Mosolov's work is based on a similarly individualistic and complex system of tonal organization. Deshevov was much in demand as a composer whose orchestral works sought to recreate in music techniques used in theatre and film, whilst Popov, a contemporary of Shostakovich at the Leningrad Conservatoire, won the praise of Prokofiev and Glazonuv, as well as that of his more famous fellow student. However, not everyone was so keen on the new avant garde. The standard Communist line on the arts was evident even in the early years of the Soviet Union.
Art belongs to the people.
While the music of the 1920s clearly went against these principles, the Party was too busy consolidating their unstable political power base to be concerned with these experimentalists, and it was not until the 1930s that Stalin started to put serious effort into controlling what Soviet artists were producing. Even so, Louriewas an early victim of the new order, emigrating to Paris in disgust of Lenin's cultural policies in 1921. In the mid-1930s, the time was ripe for Stalin to make his grip on power absolute. In the cultural field, artists' organizations and unions were merged, reformed and reconstituted in what was then called perestroika ironically a term now associated with the fall of Communism rather than the start of its darkest years. Irony, angst and personal feeling had to be eliminated from art in favor of populist works which rejoiced in the glorious potential of life under Communism.