The immediate post-war “Iron Curtain” years in the USSR were a time of artistic and cultural stagnation due to Stalin’s and Jdanov’s diktats denouncing musical formalism and exalting the method of socialist realism, with such victims as Prokofiev and Shostakovich among others, leading to stereotyped libretti subjects set to an impoverished standardized musical idiom. Opera was reborn during the brief Thaw of the early Khrushchev years as works that had been forbidden or forgotten were staged anew and musical languages that had been banned were adopted and adapted. A new genre was then born, mono-opera, which set out to depict the intense inner life of its characters.