After being condemned in 1948 for a second time by the Communist Party, after his music was banned and he was fired from his teaching posts, Shostakovich was again forced to compose film music as his only means of earning a living. Apparently, the work took its toll on the composer: as he wrote in a letter to his good friend Isaak Glikman dated December 12, 1948: "Physically, I feel quite low...I suffer from frequent headaches and besides that I feel constantly nervous, or, to put it simply, I feel like throwing up....Maybe it's simply a case of being over-tired. After all, I've written lots of film music this year. It allows me to eat, but it causes me extreme fatigue."

It was hardly a situation likely to bring out the best in Shostakovich creatively. Nor was Michurin (1948), a Soviet "biopic" created to glorify the eponymous father of Soviet biology, likely to pique his interest. The scientist I.V. Michurin was a Soviet biologist whose great contribution was to "prove" that acquired characteristics are inheritable, that is, that anything learned by one organism can be passed on to the next generation. This was, of course, nonsense already disproved by Western biology, but it appealed to Stalin, the actual head of the Soviet film industry, and he allowed Michurin to be one of two films made in the U.S.S.R. in 1948.

Stalin also personally chose to have Shostakovich write the score. There is no written record of what Shostakovich thought of the movie, but the sheer awfulness of the music he wrote for it tells us enough. Although there is no complete recording of the whole score, the suite assembled by the composer's friend Lev Atovmian shows Shostakovich's invention was, like the man himself, exhausted.

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