Shostakovich's third and final ballet, The Limpid Stream (1934 - 1935), was much more a "classical" ballet than its two predecessors, The Age of Gold with its jazz and symphonic elements, and The Bolt with its use of industrial ostinatos and deliberate avoidance of big tunes. The Limpid Stream was, in Shostakovich's words, "happy, bright, entertaining and, most important, danceable. I deliberately tried to find a clear, simple, language here, equally accessible to the viewer and the performer."

Shostakovich succeeded in his stated goal. The Limpid Stream depicts in three acts the meeting and interaction of a group of city-bred Soviet artists with the workers on a collective farm in Kuban, called The Limpid Stream. There is an easily resolved misunderstanding between the two groups in the opening act, a love interest in the second act, and a series of general dances in the third and final act. The whole piece is indeed, simple, tuneful, and thoroughly pleasant, and hardly sounds like the work of the same composer who had just finished the expressionist-modernist opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District.

Apparently, Shostakovich succeeded with his audience as well. The Limpid Stream ran from its premiere on June 4, 1935, through early February 1936 in Leningrad' s Malii Theater. In late November 1934, the work also began playing in Moscow at the Bolshoi Theater. Compared with the one disastrous performance of The Bolt in 1934, this represented a resounding success for Shostakovich. With the contemporaneous success of Lady Macbeth, Shostakovich had become at the age of 29 clearly the leading Soviet composer.

However, another event eclipsed the significance of Shostakovich's success in his own mind: he attended a Party Congress and heard the closing speech by Stalin. As he wrote to his best friend: "After hearing Stalin I completely lost any sense of moderation and shouted 'Hurrah!' along with the whole hall and applauded endlessly...Certainly, this is the happiest day of my life: I saw and heard Stalin." While it is entirely possible that Shostakovich was being ironic, the cult of Stalin was at its height, and his approval or disapproval could make or break an artist. In the case of The Limpid Stream, Stalin disapproved. Although the Communist Party's official newspaper's condemnation of Lady Macbeth on January 26, 1936 was the first direct sign of Stalin's virulent condemnation of Shostakovich, this negative notice was followed nine days later by a second article condemning The Limpid Stream. While Lady Macbeth had been condemned for its pornography, The Limpid Stream was condemned for being false to the goals of Soviet art. Both were virtual crimes in the eyes of the Party, and Shostakovich went from being the leading Soviet composer to a being a marked man.

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