Alexander Galich

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Alexander Galich

Aleksandr Galich (Russian: Александр Аркадьевич Га́лич, October 19, 1918 – December 15, 1977), was a Russian poet, screenwriter, playwright, and singer-songwriter. Galich is a pen name, a sort of acronym of his last name, first name, and patronymic (Ginzburg Aleksandr Arkadievich).

[edit] Biography

Alexander Ginzburg was born on October 19, 1918 in Ekaterinoslav (now Dnipropetrovsk) into a family of Jewish intellectuals. His father, Aron Samoilovich, was an economist, and his mother, Fanni Borisovna Eksler, worked in a music conservatory. For most of his childhood he lived in Sevastopol. Before World War II, he entered the Gorky Literary Institute, then moved to Stanislavsky's Operatic-Dramatic Studio, and then to the Studio-Theatre of A. Arbuzov and V. Pluchek (in 1939).

He wrote plays and screenplays, and in the late 1950s, he started to write songs and sing them accompanying himself with his guitar. He practically single-handedly created the genre of "bard song". Many of his songs spoke of the Second World War and the lives of concentration camp inmates -- subjects which Vladimir Vysotsky also began tackling at around the same time. They became popular with the public and were made available via magnitizdat.

Galich's increasingly sharp criticism of the Soviet regime in his music caused him many problems. In 1971, he was excluded from the Soviet Writers' Union, which he had joined in 1955. In 1972, he was expelled from the Union of Cinematographers. That year he became baptised in the Orthodox Church.

Galich was forced to emigrate from the Soviet Union in 1974. He initially lived in Norway for one year, where he made his first recordings outside of the USSR. He later moved to Munich, where he joined the Russian anti-communist organization NTS. He finally moved to Paris where, in 1977, he died of an electric shock, apparently while trying to hook up an antenna to his new stereo system (he had already suffered three strokes). While his death appears to have been an accident, some believe it was a KGB assassination^{[citation needed]}.

In 1988, he was posthumously re-instated into the Writers' and Cinematographers' Unions. In 2003, the first memorial plaque for Galich was put up on a building in Akademgorodok (Novosibirsk) where he performed in 1968. That same year, the Alexander Galich Memorial Society was founded.