Alla Pugacheva, the Soviet pop queen who outsold almost everyone
Billboard in 1988 placed her alongside Bing Crosby, Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson. Most Westerners had never heard of her, yet Alla Pugacheva is credited with more than 250 million records sold. Across the Soviet Union she was simply the queen of pop, and the media later nicknamed her the Russian Madonna.
Born in Moscow on 15 April 1949, Pugacheva went to music school at seven and studied choral conducting. She was 16 when she cut her first track, a song called Robot, for a youth radio show in 1965. The next decade was spent paying dues: touring western Siberia, playing piano for a circus college and fronting a string of bands while singing on film soundtracks.
Her breakthrough came in Bulgaria in 1975, when she won the Grand Prix of the Golden Orpheus contest with Harlequin. That single eventually sold 14 million copies. She then played a famous singer who gives up her private life for her career in the 1977 musical film The Woman Who Sings. Soviet audiences took it as autobiography, and the soundtrack reached 55 million buyers. The double album that first carried it, Mirror of the Soul, sold 10 million copies, and in 1978 she won the top prize at the Sopot festival in Poland.
Her voice, a clear mezzo-soprano delivered with raw feeling, suited both big ballads and pop. Over the years she recorded more than 500 songs in eight languages, from Russian and Ukrainian to Hebrew, Finnish and Kazakh. Albums came out as far afield as Japan, Korea, Sweden and Israel, and she played Carnegie Hall, the Olympia in Paris and the Apollo in London. A Million Scarlet Roses joined Harlequin as her best-known songs abroad.
For decades she commanded the biggest fees of any performer in Eastern Europe. The New York Times in 2000 called her Moscow's Tina Turner with a dash of Édith Piaf. She stopped touring in 2010 after a final international tour, became a People's Artist of the USSR in 1991, and made the BBC's 100 Women list in 2022.
Source: Alla Pugacheva
