Being a Soviet composer and a member of the Communist Party, it was incumbent on Shostakovich to compose a work celebrating the 50th anniversary of the 1917 Revolution. The work which Shostakovich submitted was his dark and stormy symphonic poem, October—a work that casts serious doubt on the composer's dedication to Communism.

The work begins with a slow introduction quoting the opening theme of Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony, as work written in part as a celebration of the death of Stalin. When the main Allegro begins, the music closely resembles the scherzos of both the Fifth and Seventh Symphonies, the former written after Shostakovich had been condemned by the Communist Party on the front page of their newspaper, Pravda, and the latter supposedly written in response to Stalin's Terror of the mid-1930s. Most tellingly, though, the main theme of the Allegro is based on a song he had used in a film, Volochayevka Days—a song entitled "To the Partisan." In the context of the film, "To the Partisan" is about freedom fighters against a repressive regime; that this regime could be either the Romanov dynasty or the Communist government is clear from its context in the symphonic poem. The work only turns to the major mode in its final bars and even then it closes with the "To the Partisan" theme ringing out in the brass.

This use of self-quotation to non-verbally narrate a piece of instrumental music was something Shostakovich had been doing for years; it was his way of slipping a message in between the staff lines. That Shostakovich would choose to saturate a work nominally dedicated to the October Revolution with quotations from a work which celebrates the death of Stalin, two works which depicted his cruelty, and a film score about insurrectionists tells as much about his skill as a composer as it does about what he wanted the work to really express.

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