(from posts to that newsgroup)

90% of the posts to this group are political. Most of the rest are complaints about that fact.

As a perusal of the group's FAQ will show, alt.fan.shostakovich is devoted to two politically extreme books (and the movie version of one of them), and created by a dedicated groupie of these books. That one is a proven fraud and the other an out-of-print farce by a tabloid journalist who wears his musical ignorance on his sleeve seems to have no affect on the cult-fantasies of the group that dominates a.f.s. This stuff belongs in alt.folklore.urban along with "Shostakovich Brain Shrapnel".

In other words, politics is what a.f.s. is. It's insular political orthodoxy came into being through some right-wing epiphany occurring in its young inventor's brain, ripe for being indoctrinated by the film version of Volkov's "Testimony" fraud. You can get remarkably sane and sophisticated discussion of Shostakovich's music in the rec.music groups. This is one case where the most specific is not the most useful.

So why is there an alt.fan.shostakovich? Are their really that many more Shostakovich fans than, say, Tchaikovsky?

No, but with Shostakovich, we have just the sort of cultish addenda that guarantees usenet interest:

• A sort of pre-cyberpunk film noir fantasy set in a Kafkaesque pseudo-Stalinist dystopia where Dimitri/Kingsly, pursued by Warhol-like arrays of bloated busts of Uncle Joe, is metamorphosed into an icon (Greek-Orthodox or Windows 256-color) of The New World Order of yuppie greedheads and market-worshipping skinheads. Coo-ool.
• The movie's book: Solomon Volkov's famous fraud that was supposedly secretly communicated by the dying composer, with his name (signed in blood?) forged on the chapters, heroically smuggled out of the U.S.S.R., to be published after his death. Wow.
• And if that's not enough, a former tabloid journalist and wannabe Beatles pundit proposes a cryptic "New Shostakovich", with arcane interpretations that suggest that the works of this famous composer have, for more than half-a-century, completely fooled everybody from fans to musicologists on both sides of the iron curtain as to what they are basically about!
• And there's more! Shostakovich is Reconsidered with pounds of pseudo-scholarship and self-referential silliness that will blow your mind with the DSCH-O.J.Simpson connection and proof (well, sort of) that all accredited western musicologists have been involved in a secret Stalinist conspiracy.

This is the stuff of an alt. usenet newsgroup! Debussy & Ravel, Verdi, Rossini, & Puccini may need help. But alt.fan.shostakovich is a gimme. And its content, varying in intensity as from time to time someone challenges the cult hierarchy, is about what you'd expect. Members who've sufficiently established their right-wing credentials describe at length the colorfully cinematic anti-Soviet day-dreams they experience while listening to their latest CD. One can also find quoted as gospel some rarely remembered revisionist cranks of the rabid right.

I followed this group for a few years before spending some months trying to debunk some of this fashionable but ahistorical nonsense. Stepping out of line from the insular group's political orthodoxy provokes a circling of the wagons and red-baiting at a level scarcely to be believed. I suppose my attempts have added somewhat to the political traffic you object to. Sorry. But I have done so because, as you say, his music deserves to be judged on its own merit, and not on the absurd fantasies ascribed to it by musically naive Young Republicans and axe-grinding emigres. And, while I have been a musician all my life, history is also important to me.

-Rick