In 1947, the Stalinist political climate led to the adoption and imposition by the ruling Polish United Workers' Party of the tenets of Socialist realism, and the authorities' condemnation of modern music which was deemed to be non-conformist. This artistic censorship, which ultimately came from Stalin personally, was to some degree prevalent over the whole Eastern bloc, and was reinforced by the 1948 Zhdanov decree. By 1948, the ZKP was taken over by musicians willing to follow the party line on musical matters, and Lutosławski resigned from the committee. He was implacably opposed to the ideas of Socialist realism. His "First Symphony" was proscribed as "formalist", and he found himself shunned by the Soviet authorities, a situation that continued throughout the era of Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko. In 1954, the climate of musical oppression drove his friend Andrzej Panufnik to defect to the United Kingdom. Against this background, Lutosławski was content to compose pieces for which there was social need, but in 1954 this earned him—much to the composer's chagrin—the Prime Minister's Prize for a set of children's songs. He commented: "[It was for those functional compositions of mine that the authorities decorated me ... I realised that I was not writing indifferent little pieces, only to make a living, but was carrying on an artistic creative activity in the eyes of the outside world."