Stanislav, or Stas, Mikhailov (Станислав Владимирович Михайлов) is a popular Russian singer-songwriter. He has received the prestigious titles of Distinguished Artist of the Russian Federation (Заслуженный артист Российской Федерации) and the Golden Gramophone Award. He is also the best-paid artist in all of Russia, with an income of $21 million in 2012. His most famous […]

Taisiya Povaliy (Таїсія Повалій) is a classic Soviet and Ukrainian pop and shanson singer. Born in 1964 near Kyiv to a musical family, Povaliy attended music school in Kyiv and then worked at a music hall for a few yeas before starting a solo career. She won a number of Soviet music contests at the beginning of […]

Grigory Leps (Григорий Лепс) is a Russian singer best known for his contributions to shanson (a genre of Russian music that often tells stories about the criminal underworld). Leps is from Sochi and started playing music when he was young, which initially competed with soccer in his affections—but luckily for us, music won. He studied […]

Katerina Golitsyna (originally Yakovleva; Катерина Голицына/Яковлева) is a Russian shanson singer. An ethnic Kuban Cossack, she was born in Omsk, a large Siberian city, but the family soon returned to their roots in the Russian Caucasus and then moved on again to Moscow. Golitsyna started playing music almost as soon as they got there, when […]

Mikhail Shufutinsky (Михаил Шуфутинский) is a Russian jazz and shanson legend. Growing up in postwar Moscow, he was drawn to music from his early childhood, learning to play the accordion—which was considered a “bourgeois” instrument in that Soviet era. He switched to the similar button accordion (баян), which he was able to learn at school […]

Aleksandr Novikov (Александр Новиков) is a Russian singer-songerwriter, performer, and poet who works mostly in the shanson genre, which he calls “urban romance” (городский романс). He is also the art director of Novik Records (Новик-Рекордс; “novik” also means “novice”). He was born and spent his early years on the Kuril Islands, in Sakhalin oblast, near […]

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. […]

Irina Krug (Ирина Круг) is a Russian singer, and the widow of Russian shanson singer-songwriter Mikhail Krug (Михаил Круг). Born in Chelyabinsk, Krug was interested in music and theater from a young age, but it took a while for her musical and theatrical career to kick off—she worked as a waitress initially. She met Mikhail […]

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 […]