Dmitry Shostakovich wrote around 50 scores for motion pictures—far greater than his output in any other genre—but for most of the time he did so he had little choice but to accept whatever assignments were offered to him. During the Khrushchev "thaw" after the end of Stalin's rule he was able to retire from film writing, which had been a mainstay of his compositional life from 1930 to 1955. Thereafter he accepted only a few film assignments, and then only to work with close friends and on projects he found congenial.

His earlier films include a large number of egregiously pro-Soviet hackwork propaganda pieces. By 1967, when he composed music for Sofia Perovskaya, Leonid Brezhnev was in power, and artistic activity in the Soviet Union was being channeled back into conventionally pro-Soviet forms. These included films that glorified revolutionary figures of the past, particularly in pre-Soviet Russia. Sofia Perovskaya is such a figure, but there is every indication that in this case Shostakovich was wholehearted in his interest.

The landmark composition of his early mature style period was the stunningly successful opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District—successful until it was attacked in the lead editorial of the Communist Party newspaper Pravda as "A Mess instead of Music." Overnight, the opera disappeared. Before then, Shostakovich had often said that Lady Macbeth was to be the first of a trilogy of operas about the sufferings and heroism of Russian women. Its protagonist is Katerina, a merchant's wife, kept illiterate and oppressed by her husband and father-in-law; Katerina resorts to murdering them to escape. Shostakovich then said he would compose his next opera about a young woman who leaves her comfortable middle-class life to become a revolutionary. But after the Pravda attack he wrote no more operas.

Sofia Perovskaya was perhaps some sort of a fulfillment of that long-abandoned plan. Sofia is a member of Narodnaya Volya ("People's Will"), the terrorist organization that assassinated Tsar Alexander II in 1881. She is as ruthless in her determination as Katerina was, and it seems to have been the character's strength that attracted Shostakovich to the film by Lev Arnshtam, with whom Shostakovich had been working in sound films beginning in 1930.

Shostakovich wrote 17 numbers for the score, of which two are lost. The entire score is available on compact disc. The style is Shostakovich's late symphonic one, often sardonic and thin in scoring. The first few numbers, dealing with the execution of the terrorists, satirically depict the Tsar's police in passages for only snare drum and piccolo. There is also an extended timpani solo, and only a few fully orchestral sections. The most famous number is a strange and ironic waltz. The tragic cues in the score are in the composer's familiar "adagio" style, while Sofia's music elicits an unusual degree of tenderness from Shostakovich.

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