From the History of Soviet Music: The Plenum of the Union of Soviet Composers of the USSR in 1966, Devoted to Dodecaphony

In the early 1960s the Soviet musical life underwent substantial changes as compared with the period of the previous decade. During the Soviet period the norm of social existence was formed by an informational isolation of the population from events and trends that were unwelcome in the opinion of the leaders of the country. Many socially significant events were denied publicity, including the discussion of problems of contemporary music (problem of dodecaphony), which unfolded at the Fifth Plenum of the Directory of the Soviet Composers’ Union. The struggle which took place in the first days of spring of 1966 was not only for a new musical language. The composers of the “artistic” trend, Kara Karayev, Rodion Shchedrin, Jaan Raats and Boris Kluzner among them, as well as Nelli Shakhnazarova and Mikhail Byalik, struggled against crass ignorance draped in “correct” political wording. They were standing up for their right of freedom of artistic utterance.
It was much easier to follow dogmas, to write according to rules created whenever or by whosoever, to search for an incongruous ideal of “symphonies and operas based on song material”, to reject the category of the tragic as being appropriate for Soviet art.

Nevertheless, the significance of the “Dodecaphonic Plenum” consisted, first of all, in that the established practice of suppressing the knowledge of an unfavorable event or phenomenon would be shattered by the large-scale social significance of what occurred.