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 Jewish intelligentsia family. His father Aron Samoilovich was an economist, mother Fanni Borisovna Eksler worked in a music conservatory. Most of his childhood he lived in Sevastopol. Before World War II he entered the Gorky Literary Institute, then moved to Operatic-Dramatic Studio of Stanislavsky, later (in 1939) to Studio-Theatre of A. Arbuzov and V. Pluchek.

He wrote plays and screenplays, while in the late 1950s he started to write songs and sing them with his own guitar accompaniment. 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 in the public and were made available via magnitizdat.

Galich's increasingly sharp criticism of the Soviet regime in his music caused him many problems. He was excluded in 1971 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 when trying to hook up an antenna to his new stereo system (he had already suffered three strokes before). While his death appears to have been an accident, some believe it was a KGB assassination.

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 a memorial society in his name was founded.