A CALIFORNIA based businessman has triumphed over Russian bureaucracy and narrow minded nationalism to bring a unique collection of classical music recordings to the international public.
The recordings, held for decades in the vaults of Gostele Radio, the former Soviet State broadcasting company, have recently been released on CD in Britain and the US. They are about to come out in Russia itself on a label called the Classical Russian Revelation.
On a hot summer's day 3 1/2 years ago, I was down in the Gostele Radio vaults with Tristan Del, a Canadian citizen of Russian origin who had happened upon the recordings in the course of producing a documentary film about Russia.
We lost nil track of time as we sorted through some of the 400,000 tapes of wonderful music which Communist censors had suppressed because the performers had, in one way or another, been perceived to be ideologically unsound.
I remember shaking the dust off one tape box and seeing a label which read "defective". Another label said: "When broadcasting, do nob announce the name of the conductor."
The box contained a perfectly good recording of the great late Russian pianist Emil Gilels playing Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto No 3 in D minor in a tender interpretation conducted by Kinl Kondrashin. In true Orwellian fashion, the recording had disappeared down the memory hole only because Kondrashin had had the audacity to emigrate.
As well as the musical tapes, there were some recordings of past Communist congresses, which explained why the Gostele Radio vaults were strictly closed to the public.
Embarrassing items included TV footage of the elderly and alcohol soaked Leonid Brezhnev, slurring his words and falling downstairs while the young", Mikhail Gorbachev and Eduard Shevardnadze, who were later to become the champions of perestroika, were making sycophantic speeches to the old Kremlin leader.
But mostly the archives contained classical music, including some truly historic performances.
Among them were the composer Dmitry Shostakovich playing his own piano works, the black American singer Paul Robeson on tour in Russia Mstislav Rostropovich giving the premier of the Cello Concerto which Benjamin Britten wrote specially for him, and Yehudi Menuhin and David Oistrakh in a magical combination playing Bach's Double Violin Concerto.
Tristan Del had discovered a goldmine and he knew it. His USSU Arts Group Incorporated and the archive agreed that Mr Del could market the recordings world wide in exchange for providing the archivists with modern computer equipment, and paying royalties to the artists or, if they were dead, to their estates.
And then the trouble started.
The Moscow establishment rose up to denounce Mr Del as a "cultural pirate" out to rob Russia of its heritage. The Culture Minister, Mr Yevgeny Sidorov, was among leading figures who signed an open letter in a Russian news paper demanding "protection from USSU Arts Group Incorporated headed by Mr Arkady Shadelman from Odessa, no calling himself Tristan Del."
Mr Del, denying his name was ever Shadelman, took offence at what he called "this outrageous antiSemitic slur," and the law suits started.
Finally however, Mr Del, together with the British entertainment group, Telstar, were able to bring out the recordings. The long reels of tape, dating back as far as the 1940s, were digitally reprocessed to produce compact discs.
The original recordings were often made at live concerts and the quality was not always good. On average, 10 hours of listening to the old tapes produced 30 to 60 minutes of music meeting contemporary standards of sound quality.
Reviewing the CDs in the Moscow Times last week, the music critic, Raymond Stults, called the collection "a mixed bag". Some performances were really only interesting as curiosity items because they happened to have fallen into the closed archive but others were per se of "extraorinary interest and merit", he said.
In particular, he recommended Gilels playing Beethoven Sonatas (Catalogue No RV10029) and Svyatoslav Richter playing Schumann and Liszt (Catalogue No RV10012).
David Oistrakh was well worth listening to as long as he stuck to his solo instrument, the violin, but when he ventured into conducting, the results were "drab" said the critic.
The best violin playing, in his opinion, came from the late Leonid Kogan, whose performances of concertos by Beethoven (Catalogue No RV10018) and Tchaikovsky (Catalogue No RV10019), dating back to the 1950s, "absolutely should not be missed".