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In 1936, Dmitri Shostakovich was a composer with a glittering career ahead of him. His first symphony had been a roaring success, and now his opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, was enjoying a similarly rapturous reception.

Until the evening when Stalin came to see the show. Tom Service meets Dmitry Sollertinsky, whose father was a friend of Shostakovich, to find out how the evening changed the lives of all Russian artists – and how ideology may have had little to do with it.

This is the third of Ten Icons of a Russian Century, part of the Radio 3 season Breaking Free: A Century of Russian Culture. (Photo: Corbis)