WHEN Dmitri Shostakovich answered his phone one day in March 1949 he was told to hold on: Comrade Stalin wanted to speak to him. Stalin expressed surprise that the composer had declined an invitation to go to New York for a cultural conference for peace. Shostakovich said that he was "nauseated". Stalin affected to believe that he was unwell and said he should see a doctor. But the nausea he had experienced was because none of his music and that of his colleagues Sergei Prokofiev and Aram Khatchaturian had been performed in the Soviet Union for more than a year.

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Silence over the phone: at one end the tyrant, at the other the artist. The tyrant yielded. He said he was not aware that the composers had been censored and he would "have to correct the comrades" who had given the illegal order. Next day the luckless censors were punished. Shostakovich went to New York.

While Solomon Volkov uses the life of Shostakovich as its thread, the broad theme of his well written book (which is well translated from the Russian) is the experience of gifted artists who have the misfortune to live under a dictatorship. Shostakovich survived because Stalin found it useful to have at his disposal a brilliant and internationally famous composer. He was an advertisement for the culture of the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, he was branded an "anti-people" musician. Stalin enjoyed listening to music, but his tastes were simple: he liked a good tune. Shostakovich did not always write simple music.

Stalin suspected that he and some of his colleagues were under the influence of western composers such as Arnold Schoenberg and Paul Hindemith, and that their work had become subversive to communism. At the New York peace conference Shostakovich, his voice trembling, read a speech condemning the "clique of warmongers" planning aggression against the Soviet Union. He had had the courage to bargain with Stalin to lift the ban on his music. Now he had to submit.

Stalin knew the telephone was a useful instrument in his cat and mouse games. In 1930 he called Mikhail Bulgakov, a satirist and one of Russia's most popular writers. Stalin had heard that Bulgakov was thinking of moving abroad and seemed pleased when he said that a Russian writer could not live outside his homeland. Stalin lifted a ban on his work and said they should talk. Stalin never again spoke to Bulgakov and the ban was later imposed. Bulgakov died in 1940, aged 48, apparently stricken by the ban and Stalin's silence. His masterpiece, "The Master and Margarita", was not published until 1966. In 1934 Stalin called Boris Pasternak, who was a friend of Osip Mandelstam, jailed for lampooning Stalin in verse. "We old Bolsheviks never deny our friends," Stalin said, then hung up, leaving Pasternak uncertain what he meant, but fearing the worst. For many artists the worst happened: the labour camp, suicide or execution.

Mr Volkov shows what happened to creativity in a "cruel age". But for an artist all ages are in some form cruel. Tsar Nicholas I, whom Stalin admired, cruelly manipulated Pushkin. In western Europe the church gave work only to painters who accepted its ideology. Even complacent Britain has a culture minister.