The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #39480   Message #3852822
Posted By: GUEST,Gerry
27-Apr-17 - 08:35 PM
Thread Name: Lyr Add:The Ballad of Stalin (songs about Stalin)
Subject: RE: ADD:The Ballad of Stalin (and other Stalin songs)
Richard Stites, Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society since 1900 (Cambridge University Press, 1992: ISBN 0-521-36986-X), p. 74, says that singer Leonid Utyosov was a personal favorite of Stalin. Zulya and the Children of the Underground did one of his songs as part of a themed presentation on 100 years of Russian song at the National Folk Festival in Canberra over Easter weekend. Utyosov was of Jewish origin, his birth name was Lazar (Leyzer) Iosifovich Vaysbeyn (Weissbein). I'd be surprised if Stalin didn't know this.

I think this is Utyosov in action, but everything's in Cyrillic, which I don't read: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kh9_TPyRPoc