Operatic Director. During a 40 year career at Moscow's Bolshoi Opera, he staged around 180 productions. Raised in Moscow, he had an early ambition to be a tram driver, but showed a talent for theatre. His first major undertaking was a "Carmen" produced in Siberia; he was soon appointed director of the State Opera in Minsk. Arriving at the Bolshoi in 1943, his career almost had an early end; a production of Muradeli's opera "The Great Friendship", which is based on Georgian folk tunes, displeased Stalin, who considered it tinkering with "his" favorite songs. Denounced in the Zhdanov Decree of February, 1948, Pokrovsky survived, and went on to serve as artistic director of the Bolshoi from 1952 to 1963, and again from 1973 until 1982. With the advantage of an essentially unlimited budget and long rehearsal times, Pokrovsky's name became associated with elaborately staged, and well costumed, productions. Best known for the Russian masterpieces, he still produced noted stagings of such works as "Otello" and "Tosca", and in 1965 gave the first Russian language version of Benjamin Britten's "A Midsummer Night's Dream". In 1975, he took the Bolshoi on its first trip to America, where Mussorgsky's "Boris Godunov" and Prokofiev's "The Gambler" were well-received. In 1972, he founded the Moscow Chamber Opera (which now carries his name) for smaller stagings of lesser-known works. Displeased with the end of state funding that accompanied the fall of Communism, Pokrovsky still returned to the Bolshoi occasionally into the 1990s. His honors were many; People's Artist of the Soviet Union in 1961, four Stalin Prizes, a Lenin Prize, two Orders of Lenin, two State Prizes (the last in 2004) and election as People's Deputy to the Supreme Soviet in 1989. Of the problems and possibilities of producing opera in a post-Soviet Russia he said: "Skill is in imagination. A theatre may lack money, but it must never lack imagination".