In the early years of Stalin's rule the arts in the Soviet Union were pressed more and more into the service of state propaganda goals. Thus, Shostakovich's first ballet The Age of Gold had as its heroes a Soviet sports team and as its villains all the assorted decadent persons they encounter on a trip outside Russia. In this three-act ballet, the heroes are the worker-owners of a Soviet industrial plant. The villains are "wreckers." This was an official term. The much-used word was part of a campaign to convince society that socialism was under constant threat from a hoard of potential saboteurs, anti-People parasites, drunkards, and other class enemies. In this ballet a coterie of such bad guys drops a bolt into the machinery of a factory to wreck it.

With the success of the ballet, Shostakovich organized a suite of eight movements from the music. It was played on January 13, 1933, by the Leningrad Philharmonic. In 1934 Shostakovich arranged the suite for publication. He decided to drop two numbers, and changed the titles of all the others to general ones. The 1934 version never did make it to publication until 1987, 12 years after the composer's death. Meanwhile, a musician named Leo Avtomyan had begun arranging Shostakovich's theater and film music as suites, producing four of them called Ballet Suites. He added the original Shostakovich eight-movement suite as Ballet Suite No 5.

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