Prokofiev, composer of Peter and the Wolf and Romeo and Juliet, died quietly in his apartment near Red Square. Stalin died the same day, and the resulting chaos in Moscow meant mourners struggled even to find flowers, most having been requisitioned for the dictator's funeral. Soviet newspapers barely noted the composer's passing for days.
Sergei Prokofiev's final years were marked by declining health and official harassment; he had been denounced in 1948 alongside Shostakovich for 'formalism' under the Zhdanov Doctrine, his music banned from performance for a time. He suffered from chronic high blood pressure and headaches that had confined him increasingly to his dacha outside Moscow, where he continued composing despite doctors' orders to rest no more than twenty minutes at a stretch.
He died at home around 9 PM on March 5 by the old reckoning some sources cite, though widely recorded as March 26 in certain calendars of the era's confused record-keeping—Soviet sources place his death at 6:50 PM, less than an hour before Stalin's own death was announced. The coincidence produced a darkly absurd aftermath: florists in Moscow had sold every stem to arrangements for Stalin's state funeral, leaving Prokofiev's widow unable to buy flowers for his funeral procession.
His body lay for three days in a small hall while enormous crowds pressed toward Red Square for Stalin. Pallbearers reportedly had to carry the coffin against the tide of mourners heading the opposite direction. It was a strange, muted farewell for a man whose music would long outlast the regime that had once condemned it.
Key people: Sergei Prokofiev