Iosif Kobzon
Russian crooner hailed as the Soviet Union’s Frank Sinatra
IOSIF KOBZON, who has died aged 80, was known as communism’s answer to Frank Sinatra, both on account of his velvety baritone voice and his alleged links to the (Russian, in his case) Mob.
Kobzon serenaded Soviet leaders from Brezhnev to Gorbachev with smash hits, such as one with the refrain, “Lenin you’re so young, Lenin you’re our sun”, patriotic songs and lyrical ballads.
With his burly physique, fuzzy dark-brown toupee and pencilled-in eyebrows, he may have lacked the sinuous charm of his blue-eyed American counterpart, but he remained wildly popular in Russia from the early 1960s.
He officially retired in 1997, following his election to the State Duma, by which time he had notched up the sort of tally in medals more typical of a four-star Soviet general (in 2007 he would feature in the Russian edition of the Guinness Book of Records as the most decorated artist in the country’s history).
He had also become a millionaire oil trader and coal baron, a career he had launched in the years of perestroika and built up after the Soviet Union’s collapse.
In 1995 suspicions about his offstage activities found their way into the headlines when the US embassy in Moscow abruptly revoked his American visa after the FBI concluded that he had links to the Russian Mob in the US.
The FBI alleged that Kobzon ran a criminal organisation involved in racketeering, international arms trading and drug trafficking. In 1996 Israeli immigration officials detained him for several days on similar suspicions. In 2003 a Swiss court froze Kobzon’s assets in a Swiss bank alleging they had been laundered.
Kobzon remained banned from the US until his death, and in 2015 had sanctions imposed on him by the EU after he had visited Ukraine in support of separatist fighters in Donetsk, and accepted appointment as honorary consul of the self-declared Donetsk republic. “I spit on these sanctions,” he declared, although he admitted planning to travel to Europe for medical treatment.
When he was given a visa (on humanitarian grounds) to travel to Italy for cancer treatment (allegedly following the intervention of his friend Vladimir Putin) it prompted a rare outburst of criticism, some in the Russian media noting that he had voted for a 2012 law, against adoptions by US families, which prevented some Russian orphans from receiving treatment abroad.
Iosif Davidovich Kobzon was born on September 11 1937 to a poor Jewish family in Chasiv Yar, in the Donbass region of Ukraine. As part of a children’s choir, he performed in front of Stalin and later trained at the Gnessin music school in Moscow.
He rose to fame in the early 1960s with Cuba My Love, a song praising the struggle of Cuban communists against the US, and during the leadership of Leonid Brezhnev (1964–82), with a voice that could easily withstand singing marathons lasting seven or eight hours, he became a perennial fixture on Soviet radio and television.
The only glitch in his career occurred in 1983 when he was briefly expelled from the Communist Party for “political short sightedness,” after he performed Jewish songs during an international friendship concert, prompting a walkout by Arab delegates.
From 1997 Kobzon was a pro-putin United Russia deputy in the State Duma, where he campaigned for limits on foreign music in radio and television broadcasts, for bans on sex scenes on television and on lip synching, and for steps to be taken to promote the art of whistling.
Though officially retired, he continued to appear in concerts and on Russian television. In 2007 he celebrated his 70th birthday with a seven-hour-long concert at the Kremlin and a tour of former Soviet republics.
Kobzon is survived by his third wife, Nelly, and by a son and daughter.