Dear Gentlemen,

In this blog I have tried to assemble a list of prominent Soviet tenors – tenors behind the Iron Curtain – singers the careers of which went largely obscure from the Western public because of the political realities of the era they were part of – realities which dictated the detachment of the Soviet opera from its Western counterpart.
It just so happened that these times were the Golden Era of the Russian Opera, and the voices that were hidden behind the Iron Curtain were of a remarkable quality.
In addition to that, the revival of these voices in the West is also of much interest because of the unique character and the idiosyncratic nature of the Soviet school of operatic singing, which was different from the Western in many aspects.
By “voices behind the Iron Curtain” I mean those artists whose entire career or a significant part of it developed during the most ideologically radical years of the Soviet rule and the Soviet Union’s disconnection from the West, and not those who had already established a name for themselves in an earlier period, or those who have only started their way in Soviet Union’s very last days or are singing well into the present – both are more familiar to the Western public.
In cases of some of the singers the information and the recordings presented here is all that is left of them, and in some cases appears for the first time in the internet, or in English and for the Western public.

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Zinoviy Shulman (1904)






Born in Odessa. Son of a famous cantor.
Graduated from Odessa college, studied vocal with the soloist of Odessa opera Theater V.Selyavin, then was advised by him to do to Moscow to continue his studies. There he sang in amateur troupes and studied with D.Gorin.
His first appearance was in 1923, and in 1924 he traveled to Ukraine with the brigade of the Artist Union.
His first solo concert was in Odessa in march 1925, where he sang Jewish songs and romances.
In 1929 he succeeded in getting through a tough competition before a commission that decided on which singers would be sent to perfect their skills in Italy.
Studied in Musical-Dramatic department of the State Institute of Theatrical Arts, finishing it in 1934.
In 1934-1935 he was a soloist of the Stanislavsky Opera Theater.
Devoted himself to gathering and performing Jewish songs and also sang arias in Yiddish. In his programs for the first time could be heard the songs of the most famous Jewish soviet poets and composers.
In 1939 he is a laureate of the first all-USSR competition for stage singers in Moscow.
During the Second World War he sang a lot in front of first line soldiers and in army hospitals.
In 1948 the concert of Zinoviy Shulman in Moscow was attended by Golda Meir, and a few days after that she asked him to perform the Jewish Traditional Prayer for the victims of the Holocaust in the Moscow's central synagogue.
In 1949 Shulman was arrested by the Soviet authorities and was charged with Jewish nationalism, getting a sentence of 10 years in prison.
In 1956 he got back to Moscow and started performing again.