It wasn’t tuneful, but it was memorable. I was chairing a conference about `Empire”‘ in Sweden and on the final evening I got bored with the official entertainment and suggested a sing-song. These are ...

This year marks the 120th anniversary of Dmitri Shostakovich’s birth on 25 September 1906 in St Petersburg (later Leningrad). He made an enormous contribution to the Soviet Union, as his life spanned ...

They don’t know the words. They don’t speak Russian. Still, millions of TikTok users keep hitting replay on a 1938 Soviet song about a girl on a riverbank. “Katyusha” arrived on the platform not as a ...

A portrait film of the Soviet popular music. Popular performers and composers talk about their work. The film includes, both on the screen and behind it, the songs “A Song Is Going in a Circle”, “A ...

Yuz Aleshkovsky, one of the Soviet Union's best-known dissident writers, has died in the United States at the age of 92. Aleshkovsky's son, Aleksei Aleshkovsky, said on March 21 that his father had ...

When Western Electric invented electrical sound recording 100 years ago, it completely transformed the public’s relationship to music. Before then, recording was done mechanically, scratching sound ...

Three weeks into Russia’s war against Ukraine, the chorus and orchestra at Odesa’s opera house gathered outside the building to send a message to fellow Ukrainians, to the Russians and to the rest of ...