Editing Openai/6874b524-4134-8013-b5e6-0601c853d841 (section)

===== The early 1930s were professionally disastrous for Yakob. =====

His 1929 ballet, The Tenth Hammer, was denounced by the Composers’ Union as “formalist, decadent, and contaminated by Negro-American rhythmic infection.” He was summoned to a public criticism session in 1930, where fellow composers—some forced, others opportunistic—called his music “anti-people” and “alien to Soviet ideals.”

His response—sarcastic, cryptic, and stubborn—only deepened suspicion.

For a time, he was reduced to ghostwriting patriotic choral arrangements for a Red Army ensemble and composing “correct” melodies for state radio.

By 1934, he was under surveillance.

That same year, Sergei Kirov was assassinated. The Great Purge began.

In 1936, a denunciation was filed against Yakob by a former collaborator: a vague but damning accusation of “aesthetic sabotage” and “corruption by capitalist jazz.” Artur was quietly notified. He managed to have the denunciation buried—for now—by leaning on contacts and providing a falsified dossier on Yakob’s supposed “re-education efforts.”

Yakob was ordered to publicly recant. He refused.

Instead, he withdrew almost entirely from public life. He composed in secret. Among these works: “Elegy for Stravinsky in Absentia”, a piano suite never performed in his lifetime.