Singer Zykina Dies at 80
Agence France Presse
MOSCOW — Lyudmila Zykina, one of the Soviet Union’s best-loved folk singers who rose to stardom from the factory floor to charm millions at the height of the Cold War, died Wednesday at the age of 80. The ITAR-TASS news agency quoted her doctor Vladimir Konstantinov as saying that she had died in a Moscow hospital on Wednesday morning. Born in Moscow in 1929, Zykina worked during World War II as a turner in a Moscow machine tool factory, and her singing career took off after she won a pan-Russian singing competition in 1947. In a career that spanned Russia’s postwar history, she sang in a choir in front of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and also met former president and post-Communist strongman Vladimir Putin. Zykina came from a family of singers and her father had sung as a bass. She said she learned her first Russian folk songs from her grandmother Vasilisa. With her powerful, deep voice, she symbolized the Soviet style of Russian folk singing, using traditional songs but performed in an almost operatic style with orchestral backing. Dubbed the “Russian Edith Piaf” in some quarters, Zykina even received a proposal from the Beatles to record an album, Russian state media said. She charmed millions of Soviet television viewers with songs like “Volga,” a paean to the famed Russian river, or “I am flying over Russia” and remained a revered figure even after the collapse of Communism. She had been decorated as a People’s Artist of the Soviet Union and a hero of socialist labor and also won the prestigious Lenin Prize in 1970. Zykina told a news conference in May that whether she was working in a factory or singing on stage her aim had always been “to be useful and needed by people.” “When they say, ‘Zykina, she’s a great singer,’ I don’t understand. All I have ever tried to do is work,” she said, quoted by Russian news agencies. Tributes poured in from prominent Russian figures, with condolences coming from President Dmitry Medvedev. Russian baritone Dmitry Khvorostovsky said, “Russia has lost one of its great voices.”
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