Leading article: An inspiration to Russia and the world

For Russians, music is more than an art; it is their soul and hence their politics. Just picture the ragged remnants of the Leningrad Symphony Orchestra under siege from the Nazis painfully tuning up to play Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony for radio broadcast in the darkest days of the war, or the years in which the visit of Russian players (including Rostropovich) to the West became the one bright point of contact in the bitter Cold War. Music wasn't a substitute for life in the old Soviet Union; it was life.

Which is why Stalin took such a close and oppressive interest in it, and why figures such as Mstislav Rostropovich, who died yesterday, are so important not just to music but to history. Like his great friend and mentor, the composer Dimitri Shostakovich, Rostropovich lived through the decades of post-war oppression by Stalin and his immediate successors. Unlike Shostakovich (who died in 1975), "Slava", as he was known to his friends, finally left the Soviet Union - as so many writers and artists before him - for self-imposed exile in the West in 1974.

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As a cellist he was unsurpassed. His interpretations of the Bach solo works remain as the high point of the recorded catalogue. He brought to Western ears a whole new sense of sensuality and fire to the cello classics by Haydn and Dvorak. But he also worked to introduce to the West, both as instrumentalist and conductor, the works of the Russian moderns, notably Shostakovich and Prokofiev, as well as others such as Lutoslawski and Penderecki, all of whom wrote works specifically for him.

Even if he had never strayed out of the recording studio, he would be regarded as one of the great performers of the 20th century. But he was also, because of the age he lived in, a symbolic figure, brave enough to use his standing to promote the thawing of the Cold War and the coming of democracy to Russia. When his friend Solzhenitsyn came under attack, he wrote an open letter in support in 1970 (and opened himself to persecution). When the Berlin Wall fell, he took his cello to give an impromptu concert on the spot that captured the moment for millions of viewers. When his friend Boris Yeltsin struggled to hold democracy in Moscow, he was there to help him. And, when it came to his last painful end in hospital, it was to Russia, the country that had stripped him of citizenship in 1978, that he returned to die - an artist of the world, but always a great Russian.