Composer, Administrator. He has been called "The Salieri of Soviet Music". As head of the Union of Soviet Composers from 1948 to 1991 he was the mouthpiece and enforcer of his government's restrictive musical policies. In this capacity he complicated the lives of three generations of Russian composers, notably Dimitri Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev. Tikhon Nikolaevich Khrennikov was born in Yelets, Orlov District, and educated at the Gnessin Academy of Music and Moscow Conservatory. His confident Symphony No. 1 (1936) was submitted as his graduation thesis. As a student he allied himself with the Kremlin-sponsored Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians and first came to the authorities' attention with a 1936 article attacking Prokofiev. He continued to curry official favor with his first opera, "Into the Storm" (1939), based on a favorite novel of Stalin's, and by writing patriotic songs during World War II, some of which became popular hits. His consonant, optimistic-sounding music - and his skills at navigating treacherous political waters - eventually gained him access to the higher levels of Soviet power. In January 1948 Stalin hand-picked Khrennikov to become Secretary-General of the Union of Soviet Composers. His initial act was as coordinator of the notorious First Composers' Congress of 1948, in which Stalin's cultural commissar Andrei Zhdanov viciously accused the country's leading musicians (Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Myaskovsky, Khachaturian, and Shebalin) of writing "anti-people music"; their works were banned and they were deprived of their livelihoods. Shostakovich, whose symphonies Khrennikov described as "frantically gloomy and neurotic", became the bureaucrat's favorite whipping boy; he proscribed the composer's great Symphony No. 13 ("Babi Yar") after failing to sabotage its 1962 premiere. He later targeted such gifted figures as Alfred Schnittke, Edison Denisov, and Sofia Gubaidulina, banning their music and denying them teaching posts and permission to travel abroad. Throughout this Khrennikov's own composing career continued apace with a number of large-scale works: the Symphony No. 2 (1943) and No. 3 (1973), three piano concertos, the Violin Concerto No. 1 (1959), the Cello Concerto (written for Mstislav Rostropovich, 1964), much theatre music and some 25 film scores. Although tuneful and populist in spirit, these have not exported well to the West, where Khrennikov's reputation as a Stalinist henchman has gotten in the way of objective analysis, but at home they were promoted as "models of Socialist Realist art". He was showered with major awards, including the Order of Lenin and People's Artist of the USSR, and elected to the Supreme Soviet in 1974. Khrennikov was the last union chief appointed by Stalin still in authority when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Called to account for his actions over the years, he answered his critics with an autobiography, "That's the Way It Was" (1994), in which he claimed he was only following orders and was under the same life-threatening pressures as his colleagues, pointing out that he lost a brother to Stalin's purges of the 1930s. Russian President Vladimir Putin restored Khrennikov to official honor, lobbying for him to receive UNESCO's Mozart Prize in time for his 90th birthday in 2003. He asked to be buried in his native Yelets, where his birthplace is a museum and statues of him can be seen. Khrennikov may not have been quite the hardline "evil genius" his detractors have made him out to be. At the height of Stalin's anti-Semitic edicts of the late 1940s he put himself at risk to defend Jewish composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg, and he was said to have secretly provided financial aid to the ailing Prokofiev and later his widow. But he actively sought power, maneuvered to keep it through half a dozen Communist regimes, and gave his unquestioning support to one of the world's most oppressive dictatorships. Whether he will be remembered for his politics or his music is for history to decide.