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.

You can reach me at:


Muslim Abdullin (1916)




Lyrical tenor. People’s artist of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic (1947)
Born in eastern Kazakhstan, in the town of Kamenogorsk.
In the age of 15 entered the newly opened Alma-Ata Musical-Dramatical College (1932). As one of the most promising students was sent to the Musical Studio of the Moscow conservatory to the class of professor A.I.Vishnevskiy.
In 1939-70 - soloist of the Kazakh Theater of Opera and Ballet.
One of his most memorable roles in the russian repertoire is Lensky, and some of his biggest roles in the Kazakh repertoire are Tulegen ("Kyz-Zhibek"), Kajrakpay ("Zhalbyr), Balpan ("Er-Targyn"), Azima ("Abay").
His biography is closely matched by his twin brother - Rishat Abdullin, a baritone, People's artist of the USSR.
The two brothers often sang together the romances of Rimsky-Korsakov, Glinka, Moussorgsky in Kazakh language and popularized them among the Kazakh public.