Marc Almond: In Search Of Vadim Kozin

Marc Almond travels to Moscow in search of the marvelous Russian tenor Vadim Kozin, tango-singer and superstar. The darling of the Soviet Union, Kozin melted hearts by the tens of millions in the 1940s, playing to packed concert halls and rallying Red Army troops in World War 2. 

Kozin made dozens of hit records and lived the high-life of a celebrity in the most rarified circles around Stalin. But he vanished one day in 1944 when the secret police arrested him and sent him to the GULAG for homosexuality. * His records were pulled from the shops, his voice from the radio. The public thought him dead, but Kozin would spend the next 50 years in Siberia, still singing and performing in the strange looking-glass world of internal exile.

BBC World Service. 

The producer, Monica Whitlock, writes about Vadim here.

* Possibly not really for homosexuality. He was released in 1950.