After he was condemned by Pravda in January 1936, Shostakovich's heretofore prodigious output slowed to a trickle. The year 1937 saw the composition of only the Fifth Symphony, four Romances on Texts by Pushkin, and the film score Volochayevka Days.

Hired by the Vasilyev brothers, Georgiy and Sergey, to provide the music for their film about Japanese intervention in the Far East during the Russian Civil War, Shostakovich turned out the score quickly in late 1937. However, he expended a great deal of compositional energy working on the theme song for the film, "The Song of the Partisan," claiming to have written ten versions of the song before he was satisfied with his work. In the event, his efforts found justification as the song became one of his most popular tunes from the late 1930s. Indeed, Shostakovich himself liked it so much that he later reused it as the second theme of his symphonic poem October from 1967.

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