Victoria Sid

Patrick Kingsley is a British journalist who is an international correspondent for The New York Times, based in Berlin.

Igor Vladimirovich Talkov (4 November 1956 – 6 October 1991), was a Soviet Russian rock singer-songwriter and film actor. His breakthrough came in 1987 with the David Tukhmanov-composed song Clean Ponds which was an instant hit. Talkov's lyrics are mostly about love, but also contain social critic of the Soviet regime. He was shot dead in 1991.

Early life and career

Igor Talkov was born in Gretsovka, Tula Oblast, Soviet Union on 4 November 1956. He grew up in Shchyokino. After leaving the army, Talkov started singing in the restaurants of Moscow and Sochi.

Talkov's breakthrough came in 1987 with the David Tukhmanov-composed song Clean Ponds which was an instant hit. While he is mostly remembered for songs about love and fate, most of his work held a clearly political message against the Soviet regime, calling for a change. This is one of the reasons why Talkov was never popular with the Soviet government; even as a performer renowned and loved throughout the whole Soviet Union, he lived in a small two-room apartment with his wife and son, composing his lyrics and music "on top of the washing machine in the bathroom", according to the rumours. He was not satisfied with Perestroika, claiming it to be nothing but the same regime under a different guise. In his post-Perestroika songs, he openly mocked the changes, calling them a ruse. Talkov was an avid reader of pre-revolutionary Russian history, which served as the inspiration for many of his songs. He even guaranteed at his last concert that he was willing to "back up" his lyrics with historical facts.

Talkov also made a brief presence in the cinema, acting in the films Behind the Last Line and Tsar Ivan the Terrible . The latter film he disliked, apologizing to a preview audience for participating in the film. Since Talkov refused to complete post-production sound on the film, his character was voiced by another actor.

Talkov's songs also have much in common – particularly from a lyrical perspective – with Russian bard music.

Death

According to Talkov's wife Tatyana and son Igor Jr., the last months of the singer's life he received threats.

Many performers performed at the concert, which took place on 6 October 1991 in St. Petersburg at the Yubileiny Sports Palace. A friend of the singer Aziza, at her request, asked Igor Talkov to perform first, since Aziza did not have time to prepare for the exit. Talkov called the singer's guard Igor Malakhov to his dressing room, and a verbal conflict occurred between them. After that, two guards Igor Talkov took Igor Malakhov out of the dressing room. Talkov began to prepare for his performance, but a few minutes later the administrator of his Lifebuoy group, Valery Shlyafman, ran up to him, shouting that Malakhov had taken out a revolver. Talkov pulled out a gas pistol from his bag, which he had acquired for self-defense, ran into the corridor and, seeing that his guards were at gunpoint of Igor Malakhov, fired three shots at him. Malakhov bent down, and the guards, taking advantage of this delay, began to neutralize him. Then he fired two shots, but one bullet hit the floor, and the second - into the box with the equipment. The guards began to beat the shooter, and, covering his head, he dropped his revolver. A few moments later, another shot rang out, which hit Igor Talkov in the chest. An hour later, when the ambulance team arrived, the doctors immediately stated biological death.

The prosecutor's office opened a criminal case. Igor Malakhov, who was put on the all-Union wanted list, voluntarily came to confess 10 days later. In December 1991, the charge of premeditated murder was dropped. After conducting examinations in April 1992, the investigation established that the last shot was made by Valery Schlyafman, Talkov's one time manager. However, in February 1992, the defendant left for Israel, with which Russia did not have an extradition agreement at the time, and the murder case was suspended. In November 2018, the Investigative Committee resumed its investigation into the singer's murder.

Aftermath

While Valery Schlyafman was suspected of the murder by a Russian court in 1992, he fled through Ukraine to Israel before he could be arrested. He remains in Israel to this day, insisting he is not guilty of the crime while Israel refuses to extradite him. Schlyafman and his supporters have claimed that the KGB orchestrated the murder.

In 1999 Talkov was honoured with his image portrayed on a Russian postage stamp. There is an Igor Talkov Museum in Moscow.

Yuri Yulianovich Shevchuk (born 16 May 1957) is a Soviet and Russian rock musician and singer/songwriter who leads the rock band DDT, which he founded with Vladimir Sigachev in 1980.

He is best known for his distinctive gravelly voice. His lyrics detail aspects of Russian life with a wry, humanistic sense of humor. He is also famous for opposing pop music culture (especially playback performances) for many years. He is often accredited with being the greatest songwriter in present-day Russia.

Biography

Shevchuk was born in Yagodnoye in Magadan Oblast and raised in Ufa, Bashkir ASSR. Shevchuk was an art teacher before founding DDT. By the time their third album Periferiya (Periphery) was released, Shevchuk had got a high pressure by Soviet censorship.[1] In 1985 he disbanded his group and resettled to St. Petersburg, Russia, with his wife, Elmira. In Saint-Petersburg he assembled a new line-up and became a member of Leningrad Rock Club. In 1989, DDT had performed in Hungary, in 1990 - in USA and Japan for the first time ever. In 1992, Shevchuk lost his wife due to cancer; an album Aktrisa Vesna (Spring the Actress) contained her paintings and was dedicated to her.

In January 1995, during the First Chechen War, Shevchuk went on a peace mission to Chechnya, where he performed 50 concerts for both Russian troops and Chechen citizens alike.

In 1999, Shevchuk visited Yugoslavia with concerts in protection of its integrity, sharply criticized USA for bombing of the sovereign state and shot some reports about destroyed Orthodox churches in the Serbian region of Kosovo for UNESCO.

In the 2000s, Shevchuk was highly critical of what he considered the undemocratic nature of Vladimir Putin's Russia (see: Putinism), and was one of the only public celebrities who aired oppositionist grievances face-to-face with Putin during a now-famous sit-down with cultural figures. On 3 March 2008, he participated in a Dissenters March in Saint Petersburg against the presidential elections in which no real opposition candidates were allowed to run. One of his controversial songs, "Kogda zakonchitsya neft", has the lyrics "When the oil runs dry, our president will die".

On 24 and 26 September 2008, he organized two peace concerts in Moscow and Saint Petersburg in protest of the Russian–Georgian war. The name of the concert, "Don't Shoot", was taken from his song "Ne Strelyai" that he had written in 1980 as a response to the Soviet–Afghan War. Together with his band DDT he performed with Georgian jazz singer Nino Katamadze, Ossetian band Iriston and Ukrainian band Bratya Karamazovy. Parts of the profits from the concerts were given to those who had suffered from the war, both Ossetians and Georgians.

In May 2010, Shevchuk received considerable media attention following a pointed dialogue with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in which he openly confronted him (on state television) with questions regarding such controversial topics as democracy, freedom of speech, assembly, and freedom of the press in Russia. In a 2017 interview, he admitted that the day after the dialogue he "got a call from United States Congress with an invitation to give some kind of lecture..." and his answer was: "[we] will settle it by ourselves". He also stated that some of his requests were treated and processed by Kremlin administration.

Bulat Shalvovich Okudzhava (May 9, 1924 – June 12, 1997) was a Soviet and Russian poet, writer, musician, novelist, and singer-songwriter of Georgian-Armenian ancestry. He was one of the founders of the Soviet genre called "author song" (авторская песня, avtorskaya pesnya), or "guitar song", and the author of about 200 songs, set to his own poetry. His songs are a mixture of Russian poetic and folksong traditions and the French chansonnier style represented by such contemporaries of Okudzhava as Georges Brassens. Though his songs were never overtly political (in contrast to those of some of his fellow Soviet bards), the freshness and independence of Okudzhava's artistic voice presented a subtle challenge to Soviet cultural authorities, who were thus hesitant for many years to give him official recognition.

Life

Bulat Okudzhava was born in Moscow on May 9, 1924, into a family of communists who had come from Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, to study and to work for the Communist Party. The son of a Georgian father, Shalva Okudzhava, and an Armenian mother, Ashkhen Nalbandyan, Bulat Okudzhava spoke and wrote only in Russian.

Okudzhava's mother was the niece of a well-known Armenian poet, Vahan Terian. His father served as a political commissar during the Civil War and as a high-ranking Communist Party member thereafter, under the protection of Sergo Ordzhonikidze (1886-1937). His uncle Vladimir Okudzhava was an anarchist and terrorist who left the Russian Empire after a failed attempt to assassinate the Kutaisi governor.[2] Vladimir was listed among the passengers of the infamous sealed train that delivered Vladimir Lenin, Grigory Zinoviev and other revolutionary leaders from Switzerland to Russia in 1917.[3]

Terror and war

Shalva Okudzhava was arrested in February 1937 during the Great Purge, accused of Trotskyism and wrecking. He was shot on 4 August, along with his two brothers. His wife was arrested in 1939 "for anti-Soviet deeds" and sent to the Gulag. Bulat returned to Tbilisi to live with his relatives. His mother was released in 1946, but arrested for the second time in 1949, spending another 5 years in labor camps. She was fully released in 1954 and rehabilitated in 1956, along with her husband.

In 1941, at the age of 17, one year before his scheduled school graduation, Bulat Okudzhava volunteered for the Red Army infantry, and from 1942 he participated in the war against Nazi Germany. After his discharge from the service in 1944, he returned to Tbilisi where he passed his high school graduation exams and enrolled at Tbilisi State University, graduating in 1950. After graduating, he worked as a teacher, first in a rural school in the village of Shamordino in the Kaluga Region, and later in the city of Kaluga itself.

Return to Moscow

In 1956, three years after the death of Joseph Stalin, Okudzhava returned to Moscow. Following his parents' rehabilitation and the 20th Party Congress at which Khrushchev denounced Stalin, Bulat Okudzhava was able to join the Communist Party, of which he remained a member until 1990. In the Soviet capital he worked first as an editor in the publishing house Molodaya Gvardiya (Young Guard), and later as the head of the poetry division at the most prominent national literary weekly in the former USSR, Literaturnaya Gazeta ("Literary Newspaper"). It was then, in the middle of the 1950s, that he began to compose songs and to perform them, accompanying himself on a Russian guitar.

Soon he was giving concerts. He only employed a few chords and had no formal training in music, but he possessed an exceptional melodic gift, and the intelligent lyrics of his songs blended perfectly with his music and his voice.[citation needed. His songs were praised by his friends, and amateur recordings were made. These unofficial recordings were widely copied as magnitizdat, and spread across the USSR and Poland, where other young people picked up guitars and started singing the songs for themselves. In 1969, his lyrics appeared in the classic Soviet film White Sun of the Desert.

Songwriter, poet and novelist

Though Okudzhava's songs were not published by any official media organization until the late 1970s, they quickly achieved enormous popularity, especially among the intelligentsia – mainly in the USSR at first, but soon among Russian-speakers in other countries as well. Vladimir Nabokov, for example, cited his Sentimental March in the novel Ada or Ardor.

Okudzhava, however, regarded himself primarily as a poet and claimed that his musical recordings were insignificant. During the 1980s, he also published a great deal of prose (his novel The Show is Over won him the Russian Booker Prize in 1994). By the 1980s, recordings of Okudzhava performing his songs finally began to be officially released in the Soviet Union, and many volumes of his poetry were also published. In 1991, he was awarded the USSR State Prize. He supported the reform movement in the USSR and in October 1993, signed the Letter of Forty-Two.

Okudzhava died in Paris on June 12, 1997, and is buried in the Vagankovo Cemetery in Moscow. A monument marks the building at 43 Arbat Street where he lived. His dacha in Peredelkino is now a museum that is open to the public.

A minor planet, 3149 Okudzhava, discovered by Czech astronomer Zdeňka Vávrová in 1981 is named after him. His songs remain very popular and frequently performed. They are also used for teaching Russian.

Okudzhava, like most bards, did not come from a musical background. He learned basic guitar skills with the help of some friends. He also knew how to play basic chords on a piano.

Okudzhava tuned his Russian guitar to the "Russian tuning" of D'-G'-C-D-g-b-d' (thickest to thinnest string), and often lowered it by one or two tones to better accommodate his voice. He played in a classical manner, usually finger picking the strings in an ascending/descending arpeggio or waltz pattern, with an alternating bass line picked by the thumb.

Initially Okudzhava was taught three basic chords, and towards the end of his life he claimed to know a total of seven.

By the nineties, Okudzhava adopted the increasingly popular six string guitar but retained the Russian tuning, subtracting the fourth string, which was convenient to his style of playing.