Mikhail Boyarskiy (Михаил Сергеевич Боярский) is a Soviet and Russian actor and singer. Best known for his work on historical action-adventure films, Boyarsky rose to nationwide fame for his role of d’Artagnan in the 1978 Soviet adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers. He is also well known as a singer and became an Honored Artist […]

Svetlana Surganova (Светлана Яковлена Сурганова) is a Russian singer, musician, soloist, poet, and band leader most famous for her role in the Night Snipers (Ночные снайперы, 1993–2002) and as leader of the group Surganova and Orchestra (Сурганова и оркестр). Surganova, born in 1968, is originally from Leningrad and started to write songs at the age […]

Venya D’rkin (Веня Д’ркин; originally Aleksandr Litvinov, Александр Литвинов) was a Ukrainian (Russian-speaking) poet, songwriter, musician, artist, and storyteller, and one of the later generation of bards. He had a much more informal, unpolished image than some other recent musicians, showing his truly countercultural ethos. D’rkin grew up in a small mining town near Luhansk. […]

Kirill Komarov (Кирилл Комаров) is a Russian rock and experimental musician, one of the stranger and more interesting of recent times. From St. Petersburg, he studied Turkish philology at the Eastern Department of Leningrad State University, after which he began translating Turkish poetry and also writing his own original verses. He started writing the songs […]

Zemfira (Земфира) is the stage name of Zemfira Talgatovna Ramazanova (Земфира Талгатовна Рамазанова), a Russian rock musician originally from Ufa, Bashkortostan. Zemfira has sold more than three million records over the course of her career, and continues to be popular in Russia and the former Soviet Republics. Zemfira was influenced from an early age by rock […]

Aleksandr Rozenbaum (Александр Розенбаум) is a Russian/Soviet bard, singer-songwriter, and poet who is widely known across Russia. His songs—there are more than 800 of them—have been popular for decades, and he has won many Shanson of the Year and other awards. He was born in 1951 in St. Petersburg to parents who worked in medicine. […]

Mikhail Krug (Михаил Круг; his real last name is Borobyov, Боробьёв) was a Russian singer-songwriter and musician, one of the most famous and highly regarded in the genre of shanson, or “criminal music” (referring usually to the subject matter). He was also a bard. He died in 2002, at the age of 40. Krug grew […]

Aleksandr Dolskiy (Александр Дольский) is a Russian bard, along the lines of Vladimir Vysotsky, Bulat Okudzhava, and others. He is a guitar player and actor in addition to a singer-songwriter. His songs have less of a folk style than do those of some bards—his musical education was extensive, and his songs display a high degree […]

Evgenii Margulis (Евгений Шулимович Маргулис) is a prolific Russian rock musician, singer, songwriter, composer, and one of Russia’s most famous blues composers.  He is known as a founding member of one of Russia’s most important classic rock bands, Time Machine (Машина времени), as well as a founder and on-again-off-again participant in Voskresenie (Воскресение), also a […]