growls and gasps’ however I struggle to hear these sounds when listening to Shostakovich’s only opera. In Act 4, when Katerina and Sergei are on their way to the labour camp in Siberia, Katerina has several extremely lyrical and almost hypnotic phrases. She sings to Sergei, telling him how much she misses him, to which he replies saying ‘That you have ruined me’ , blaming her for ending up as a convict, heading off to a labour camp. Katerina begs for his forgiveness, reaching for a top B flat, joined by a fortissimo chord in the winds. One of the sections that makes the audience really empathise with Katerina is from Figure 527 onwards. She has just discovered about Sergei and Sonyetka’s tryst and is jeered at by her fellow prisoners; ‘Katerina what a dreadful mess you made of life! And without Sergei her life is oh so dreary!’ . What follows is a lament, sung by Katerina where she sings about the lake in the forest in which she pushes Sonyetka. Katerina’s lyrical melody is accompanied by pianissimo, muted sustained chords in the Upper Strings, with a tremolo pedal note in the Cellos and Basses. The Harp, Timpani and Bass Drum also play a similar part to the Lower Strings with the same pedal note in the former two instruments. In between Katerina’s phrases, the woodwinds play a dotted rhythm, which is eventually taken over by the harp and viola section. Katerina’s melody from Figure 527 is quite low in the soprano register, until she sings ‘and its water is black as oil, like my guilty conscience’, with an E flat when she sings guilty. As this is the highest note she has sung until this point, its rings out, and leads the audience to believe Shostakovich’s view on Katerina, that she was a product of her environment, that she was ‘a loving woman, a woman who feels deeply’ . She feels remorse for her actions however is still pushed towards her final action. Even this isn’t a decision Katerina takes lightly and sings ‘I am frightened!’. Women under the Soviet Union The February 1917 Revolution is generally agreed to have begun on International Women’s Day (23rd February) ‘when thousands of women from different backgrounds took to the streets demanding bread and increased rations for soldiers’ families’. When the Bolsheviks came into power in Russia in November 1917, they ‘wanted to recreate society completely’ by creating an equal society, where each individual had equal rights. This meant that women would have a more equal standing in society. They would be expected to have jobs outside of their homes, in the workforce. In October 1918, the government issued a code called the ’Family Code’, which allowed women the right to a divorce, separated marriage from the church and gave illegitimate children the same rights as legitimate children. In 1920, abortion was legalised in the Soviet Union. Laws in the workplace were also changed to help women- women were able to take paid holiday, 8 weeks paid maternity leave and the minimum wage was standardised between genders. To oversee these changes, a department called Zhenotdel was set up in 1919 and it was a specialist women’s department. However, unfortunately, things changed during the Stalinist era (1927-1953). The Communist Party’s Purges, targeted women and they were sent to work labour camps. The number of women in the Labour Camp system rose from 30,108 in 1934 to 108,898 in 1940. In the camps, they were expected to work in sewing factories and many were unfortunately the victims of violence and sexual abuse. Stalin in fact reverted some of the changes that had been made under Lenin. For example, in 1936, he banned abortion again. He also made it harder to get a divorce, by making them quite expensive to obtain. Stalin ‘put the emphasis on the family as a basic unit of society. He thought that having strong families would produce a stronger and more productive so