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:


Ivan Zhadan (1902)




Born on September 22th in Lugansk in a working-class family. From the age of 9 has lived in a village, where he was sent by his parents to be an apprentice blacksmith. Sang in church choir.
In 1920, when in the army, Zhadan was the unit's leading singer.
In 1923 entered Moscow Conservatory. In 1926 he sang for the first time on the Radio, and in 1927 he was accepted to the Opera Studio of the Bolshoi Theater and the same year won a competition and accepted to the Bolshoi Theater's soloist group, where he immediately started performing leading tenor roles.
Beside his performances in the Bolshoi Theater, he has done a lot of tours all over USSR, and was a constant participant of concerts for the government. His records went out in big editions. On his solo-concerts beside the operatic repertoire Zhadan was performing russian folk songs and romances with great success.
In november 1941 Zhadan found himself in the territory occupied by German forces and was transferred to Germany. In 1948 went to the USA, where he was giving concerts only occasionally.