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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Yuriy Marusin (1945)




Born on December 8th in the town of Kizel, in the Ural area. People's Artist of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialistic Republic (1983).
Worked as a miner, served in the army.
Graduated from Saint-Petersburg Rimski-Korsakov State Academy in 1973.
From 1972 - soloist of the St-Petersburg Maliy Academic Opera Theater.
From 1980 to 1990 - soloist of the St-Petersburg Kirov Opera Theater.
Among his roles: Pinkerton, De Grie, Jose, Imposter-Prince, Lensky, Finn, Bayan, Andrey Khovanskiy, Edgar, Andrey, Alexei.
Went to tours abroad, gave multiple concerts.
Marusin was the winner of three international competitions - the Erkel Competition (Budapest), Viotti Competition (Vercelli), and the Competition of Laureates of International Competitions in Pleven (Bulgaria).
In 1982 was awarded the diploma of the best foreign singer of the season by the italian musical society for the performance of Gabriel in "Simon Boccanegra".
Laureate of the Erkel International Competition in Budapest, Hungary.
Laureate of the Viotti International Competition in Vercelli, Italy.
Laureate of the International Competition in Plevna, Bulgaria.
Received the State Premium of the USSR (1985), and The Medal of Honor (2008).