The Fight Against Shostakovich Revisionism: "What motivates these flat-earthers? It's hard to say without putting them on the couch, but what Taruskin, Fay and Brown have in common on their CVs is a halcyon student period in the old Soviet Union where life was spartan and Shostakovich was a secret language which no-one in the west had yet cracked. They cannot forgive Volkov for his unmasking, nor can they retract their own theories without looking like idiots. And so they flourish, these red-rimmed nostalgists, fighting a Cold War from tenured positions, heedless of the discredit that they heap on the indiscipline of musicology and on the reputation of the Soviet era's greatest hero, Dmitri Shostakovich."