“Deep in the silos of the American midwest, a Cold War missile is being readied for launch. From the University of Indiana Press at Bloomington, advance copies are being mailed out this week of what is academically warranted to be ‘the definitive statement on the Shostakovich controversy’.” Norman Lebrecht is sick to death of this whole debate, and in particular, has had just about enough of the “counter-revisionist academics” who persist in their delusion that Shostakovich was nothing more than a cowed stooge for Stalin and the Communist Party. “Evidence of his moral courage and political disgust is so overwhelming that it is hard to imagine how even an ivory-towered musicologist could pretend otherwise.”