Vadim Kozin

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Vadim Kozin (Вадим Козин) (March 21, 1903 – December 19, 1994) was a Russian tenor singer.

Vadim Kozin

Vadim Alexeych Kozin was born the son of a merchant in Saint Petersburg to Alexei Gavrilovich Kozin and Vera Ilinskaya in 1903. His mother was a gypsy and often sang in the local gypsy choir. Their house was frequently full of musicians, exposing Vadim to tradition from an early age.

He began to sing professionally in the 1920s, and gained success almost immediately. In the 1930s he moved to Moscow and began playing with the accompanist Dmitri Ashkenazi.

During World War II he served in the entertainment brigade and sang for the Russian troops.

In 1944, shortly before the birthday of Stalin, the police chief Lavrenty Beria called him up and asked why his songs didn't involve Stalin. Kozin famously replied that songs about Stalin were not suited for tenor voices. In late 1944 Kozin was sentenced to 5 years in jail as part of the repression campaign against prominent Soviet performers and was sent to Magadan.

Although he was initially released in 1950 and was able to return to his singing career, he was soon framed by his enemies on charges of homosexuality and sent back to the camps. Though released once again several years later, he was never officially rehabilitated and remained in exile in Magadan until his death. Speaking to journalists in 1982, he explained how he had been forced to tour the Kolyma camps: "The Polit bureau formed brigades which would, under surveillance, go on tours of the concentration camps and perform for the prisoners and the guards, including those of the highest rank."^[1]

His prison sentence deeply traumatized Kozin, leading to the cessation of his singing career. He even began burning his own records, to the point where his friends were forced to hide their own copies from him in order to preserve them. The Soviet government never officially rehabilitated him and his 90th birthday was celebrated in private among friends in Magadan. He died at the age of 91 in 1994.

In January 2005, Vadim Kozin's diaries, edited by his friend Boris Savchenko, were published in Moscow. Kozin never ceased to look back with regret and nostalgia at the successes of his earlier years. In the words of Savchenko: "I watched him sometimes and saw that he would withdraw into himself and tears would appear in his eyes. He would sit down and put his head in his hands. He had such an expression on his face - it seemed that life had broken him, everything was spoiled and now it was impossible to bring anything back."^[2]