Shostakovich abandoned sketches for the symphony some months earlier and began anew. On 28 January 1936, when he was about halfway through work on the symphony, "Pravda" printed an unsigned editorial entitled "Muddle Instead of Music", which singled out his internationally successful opera "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk" for particularly savage condemnation. The fact that the editorial was unsigned indicated that it represented the official Party position. Rumors circulated for a long time that Stalin had directly ordered this attack after he attended a performance of the opera and stormed out after the first act.