Bulat Okudzhava

• 1. Introduction

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  Bulat Okudzhava was born in Moscow on the 9th of May 1924, into a family that had traveled from Tbilisi to serve the Communist Party. His father held high rank. His uncle had tried to assassinate a governor. A cousin of sorts rode the sealed train that carried Lenin back to Russia. By the time Okudzhava was a teenager, his father had been shot and his mother was on her way to the Gulag. What came out of that life was not a political pamphlet or a protest anthem. It was a guitar, a few chords, and about 200 songs that spread across the Soviet Union like something passed hand to hand in the dark. How does a man whose family was devoured by the system he was raised to believe in become one of that same system's most beloved voices? And what did it cost him to stay?

• 2. A Family Shaped by History

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  Shalva Okudzhava, Bulat's father, was arrested in February 1937 during the Great Purge. The charge was Trotskyism and wrecking. He was shot on the 4th of August, along with his two brothers. Bulat's mother, Ashkhen Nalbandyan, was arrested two years later for what the state called anti-Soviet deeds and sent to the Gulag. She would not be fully released until 1954, and would not be rehabilitated until 1956.

  Ashkhen came from a family of cultural standing. Her uncle was Vahan Terian, a well-known Armenian poet. Bulat's father had operated under the protection of Sergo Ordzhonikidze, a senior Bolshevik who died in 1937, the same year the arrests began. With that protection gone, the family was exposed.

  Bulat's uncle Vladimir had been an anarchist and terrorist who left the Russian Empire after a failed assassination attempt on the Kutaisi governor. Vladimir ended up aboard the sealed train that carried Lenin, Grigory Zinoviev, and other revolutionary figures from Switzerland to Russia in 1917. The Okudzhava name was braided into the very fabric of Soviet revolutionary history, and yet the family was still consumed by the machine they had helped build.

• 3. War and the Road Back

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  In 1942, at the age of 17, Bulat Okudzhava volunteered for the Red Army infantry as a 9th-grader. He fought against Nazi Germany until his discharge in 1944. He then returned to Tbilisi, completed his high school exams, and enrolled at Tbilisi State University, graduating in 1950.

  After graduation he worked as a teacher, first in a rural school in the village of Shamordino in the Kaluga Region, and later in the city of Kaluga itself. The war had shaped what he would eventually write. Songs like A Song About Infantry and We Need Only One Victory drew directly on that experience, and both found their way into major Soviet films.

  In 1956, three years after the death of Joseph Stalin, Okudzhava returned to Moscow. His parents' rehabilitation had just been granted, and Khrushchev had delivered the speech denouncing Stalin at the 20th Party Congress. Okudzhava joined the Communist Party that year, a membership he would hold until 1990.

• 4. Seven Chords and a Guitar

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  Okudzhava came to music without training. Some friends taught him a few basic chords on the guitar, and he also learned simple chords on piano. He would claim, toward the end of his life, to know a total of seven chords. That modest technical vocabulary produced about 200 songs.

  He tuned his Russian guitar to what is called the Russian tuning, D'-G'-C-D-g-b-d' from thickest to thinnest string, and often lowered that tuning by one or two tones to suit his voice. His playing style was classical in approach, using finger picking in ascending and descending arpeggio patterns or a waltz rhythm, with the thumb picking out an alternating bass line.

  Many of his songs were built around C minor, moving from the root chord to a G7 and then to either E-flat minor or C major. By the nineties he had shifted to the more common six-string guitar but kept the Russian tuning, dropping the fourth string in a way that suited how he already played. The technical details matter because they reveal a man who worked within constraints and found his voice inside them, not despite them.

• 5. The Magnitizdat Underground

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  Okudzhava began composing and performing songs in the mid-1950s, accompanying himself on a Russian guitar in the capital. His songs were not published through any official Soviet media organization until the late 1970s. For roughly two decades, the only way to hear them was through amateur recordings passed from person to person.

  These recordings circulated as magnitizdat, the audio equivalent of samizdat, the underground self-publishing of texts. They spread across the Soviet Union and into Poland, where young people picked up guitars and began singing the songs themselves. The French chansonnier tradition, represented by artists such as Georges Brassens, had influenced Okudzhava's style. Combined with Russian poetic and folk song traditions, the result was something Soviet cultural authorities found difficult to categorize and uneasy to endorse.

  Vladimir Nabokov encountered the work too. He cited Okudzhava's Sentimental March in his novel Ada or Ardor. That same song appeared in the 1964 film I Am Twenty, in which Okudzhava also made a cameo appearance as himself. The songs were finding audiences through whatever channels existed, official or not.

• 6. Recognition, Late and Real

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  Okudzhava always insisted that he was primarily a poet, and that his musical recordings were insignificant beside that identity. His novel The Show is Over won him the Russian Booker Prize in 1994. In 1991 he received the USSR State Prize. Official recordings of his songs only began to appear in the Soviet Union during the 1980s, alongside published volumes of his poetry.

  His involvement in public life extended beyond literature. In October 1993 he signed the Letter of Forty-Two, a document associated with the political reform movement in Russia. He had supported the broader reform movement in the USSR as well, and resigned from the Communist Party in 1990 after three and a half decades of membership.

  He died in Paris on the 12th of June 1997. He is buried in the Vagankovo Cemetery in Moscow. A monument marks the building at 43 Arbat Street where he lived. His dacha in Peredelkino is now a museum open to the public. In 1981, Czech astronomer Zdeňka Vávrová discovered a minor planet, now designated 3149 Okudzhava, named in his honor.