The voice the state silenced, but a million tapes couldn't
28 July 1980, during the Moscow Olympics. Vysotsky's body lay in the Taganka Theatre foyer as over 100,000 people formed a line kilometers long. Police estimated 108,000. Not a single Hamlet ticket holder asked for a refund.
A Taganka Theatre actor and the Soviet Union's greatest bard, who wrote over 700 songs for the seven-string guitar, officially barred from airwaves yet ubiquitous on copied reel-to-reel tapes. His 1971 Hamlet, an intellectual rebel in a black sweater, became a generational emblem, while his songs borrowed the masks of criminals, frontoviki, and alcoholics to speak social taboos in raw street vernacular. He was that rarest phenomenon: adored by the masses and by Brezhnev, who listened to his songs by telephone from a hospital bed. When he died at 42 during the 1980 Moscow Olympics, over 100,000 mourners filled Taganka Square, proving the scale of the voice the state had tried to erase.
Career Timeline
- 1955–56Enrolled then quit Moscow Civil Engineering Institute to pursue acting
- 1956–60Graduated from the Moscow Art Theatre School
- 1961First original song 'Tatuirovka,' launching the underworld-song cycle
- 1964Joined Taganka Theatre; debuted in Brecht's The Good Person of Szechwan
- 1967Breakthrough stardom via the film Vertical; met Marina Vlady
- 1971Hamlet premiere at Taganka — a legendary production in Soviet theatre history
- 1979Gleb Zheglov in The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed — nationwide phenomenon
- 1980Died 25 July of myocardial infarction; 100,000-strong funeral