Symphony Director Warns of Censorship : Arts: At a Senate hearing, Rostropovich compares federal aid restrictions to the suppression that prompted him to leave the U.S.S.R.

Mstislav Rostropovich, artistic director of the National Symphony Orchestra, today compared restrictions on federal aid to the arts to the Soviet Union’s censorship of writers, artists and composers.

Testifying before a Senate hearing on financing for the National Endowment for the Arts, Rostropovich recalled how he had chafed under Soviet censorship and smuggled out of that country a symphony, “Babiy Yar” by D.D. Shostakovich.

“It was that life under censorship that led me to the United States,” Rostropovich said.

Only now, he said, are Soviet people learning about some of their own writers and seeing their works published.

“Art and literature should be judged by the conscience of the creator, his peers in his field and all of the people, not by a separate bureaucracy, artificially compressing the arteries and veins of this life-sustaining circulation,” he said.

Rostropovich was among the witnesses supporting reauthorization of the NEA before the education, arts and humanities subcommittee of the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee.

The NEA has come under intense criticism for works of art produced by artists who received support from the endowment and which were judged by some to be obscene or offensive.