Stalin’s Pet: Ivan Kozlovsky, the Soviet Union’s Favourite Tenor – with Notes on Paul Robeson

This article examines the life and work of one of the most important vocalists of the Soviet Union, Kyiv-area born Ivan Kozlovsky. Kozlovsky was known to much of the world as a Russian singer who from quite early in his career personified Soviet opera. Joseph Stalin loved to hear him sing, and he enjoyed the protection of that despotic dictator to his death in 1953. Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, made it possible for the vocalist to often visit his Ukrainian homeland, cultivate its music – operatic, stage, and folk – and mix with and support the nationally conscious Ukrainian intelligentsia. He also developed relationships with some prominent foreign visitors, including the African American singer and “pro-Communist” Paul Robeson, who was deeply shaken by Khrushchev’s revelations of Stalin’s crimes. Soviet Russian censorship and Soviet Union national policy insisted that Kozlovsky was a “Russian singer,” a “Soviet singer,” or both, but this label ignored his Ukrainian background and all that was closest to his heart, and, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of an independent Ukraine, it finally became possible to openly discuss his once highly circumscribed public persona.