Plethora of outstanding artists, who belonged to Moscow school and transferred from Leningrad, unleashed their potentials in contemporary ballets and classic production, as well as in original ballets staged at the Bolshoi Theatre. They were Sulamith Messerer, Sofia Golovkina, Irina Tikhomirnova, Olga Lepeshinskaya, Asaf Messerer, Mikhail Gabovich and many others.

Production of opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District by Dmitri Shostakovich, staged at the Bolshoi in 1935 became a tragic page in the history of Russian opera theatre. A powerful strike was made at Shostakovich’s opera compared to The Bright Stream a year later. The title of an editorial article for newspaper Pravda that killed Lady Macbeth, – “Muddle instead of Music” – became a household name and is well known even to those far from music.

In 1936, Samuil Samosud moved from Leningrad Maly Operny (currently Mikhalovsky) to the Bolshoi as musical director. Talented musician, he was perfectly navigating through political situations, supported the course towards realism as much as he could and rejected all formalistic experiments. Paying humble tribute to attempts to modernize and make classic operas of the past a mainstream, the Bolshoi completely switched to productions of grand style, featured with a scale, magnitude and exceptional longlife.

Opera premiers of M. Glinka are linked with Samuil Samosud name and had a tremendous public resonance. Special meaning was attached to A Life for the Tsar, which disappeared from the repertoire for more than twenty years because of the wrong ideological content. Preparation of the premiere was broadly covered in the press: the audience had been prepped for the masterpiece comeback, which had relevant political tone. Libretto was changed, poet Sergei Gorodetsky wrote new lyrics. Name of the main hero was put into the title. Now, Kostroma peasant Ivan Susanin laid his heroic deeds not to the first of Romanov, but to the Motherland. It could not be more relevant for the world that was getting ready for a big war. National-patriotic pathos, common for performance, made it a signature of the Bolshoi Theatre for a long time. Premieres were noted with wonderful vocal and acting works: it involved leading artists of opera company – Alexander Pirogov, Mark Reizen, Maxim Mikhailov, Valeria Barsova, Glafira Zhukovskaya, Bronislava Zlatogorova and others.