Reinhold Glière is little known outside the states of the former Soviet Union but he fulfilled an important role both in Russia before 1917 and then in the nascent Soviet Union. This composer born in Kyiv Kyiv 1875 had close ties to Germany and Poland. In one way he was unique - he was successful in pre-revolutionary Russia with his powerful Third Symphony Ilya Muromets and he was able to become popular again in the Soviet era with The Red Poppy ballet which managed to capture the spirit of the time. After the 1917 Revolution he began to look eastward to Soviet Central Asia composing operas based on folk music. He became the first chairman of the Soviet Composers’ Union in 1939. An accurate and true portrayal of Russian and Soviet cultural history cannot ignore Glière although information about him, especially in English, is riddled with errors and inconsistencies. His international reputation has suffered from poor background information about his ethnicity, politics and aesthetics. Glière was believed to be of Belgian origin by many Western writers yet his family’s ethnic ties to Germany were so close that his two brothers went to live in Germany after World War 1. Was this composer an anachronism in the twentieth century producing music which belonged to the nineteenth as some critics allege or was he a significant transitional figure between late romanticism and modernism?