Aleksandr Pashchenko

Aleksandr Kirillovich Pashchenko was born on 3 June 1945 in Chkalov, the wartime and postwar name of the city now called Orenburg. His mother, Evdokia Prokofyevna Sidelnikova, came from a Cossack family in Nizhnyaya Pavlovka. His father, Kirill Ilyich Pashchenko, was from Sumy Oblast. After school he did not set out to become an actor. He tried to enter the S. M. Kirov Military Medical Academy in Leningrad. A grade of four in physics kept him out of the competition. He returned home, saw a newspaper advertisement, and in 1963 joined the Orenburg Musical Comedy Theatre as a scenery installer, planning to work a year and then try medicine again.

The year did not go as planned. Colleagues heard him singing while he worked and pushed him toward a vocal audition. With the encouragement of company manager Boris Slobodskoy he sang, danced, tapped, and read verse for the theatre's vocal intake. He was accepted into the chorus. Chief conductor Isaak Gurevich, a pupil of Bolshoi conductor Boris Khaikin, became what Pashchenko later called his "godfather" in the profession and steered him into the small part of the shepherd Andreika in Boris Alexandrov's operetta Wedding in Malinovka. From 1969 he sang solo roles. He never took a formal music-school diploma. He learned on the job, standing in the wings watching older masters, taking advice from partners, and working with teachers when chief conductor Boris Tsigelman told him he had "excellent material" and should train seriously.

In the 1960s and 1970s the Orenburg company ranked, in the informal national pecking order Pashchenko later described, among the leading musical-comedy theatres in the Soviet Union, behind Moscow, Leningrad, and Sverdlovsk at a time when the country still had dozens of such houses. A GITIS cohort arrived in 1964; partners including Evgeniya Prachek helped him stretch his voice (he credited her with helping him reach A in the second octave). Vladimir Dubovov arrived from the Saratov Conservatory. Pashchenko's early type was the "simpleton" or juvenile comic: vocally demanding, physical, and easy to undervalue beside the leading man. He insisted that playing the simpleton was "not simple," because the part needed dancing, tricks, and a full character so as not to vanish beside the hero.

That physical appetite left marks. Preparing Toni in Kalman's Die Zirkusprinzessin (Princess of the Circus), he missed a safety catch, slammed into spiked scenery, punctured his hand, and finished the act bleeding before the interval. In The Gypsy Baron a bad landing put his foot on a nail. He trained with circus acrobats to fall and jump safely, and he traced some of that toughness back to boxing as a boy. He also stretched beyond comic juveniles: Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady, the tragic title role in Rachmaninoff's Aleko, Prince Orlofsky in Die Fledermaus, and a long list of classical and Soviet musical-comedy parts including work in Silva, Maritza, Princess of the Circus, Sevastopol Waltz, Hello, I'm Your Aunt!, Hanuma, Babiy bunt, and The Night Before Christmas.

He stayed with one house for more than half a century. The theatre's own anniversary note records that he himself counted 687 roles, large and small, on that stage; secondary biographies often round the figure to "about 700." He also directed productions for the company. On 17 June 1980 he was named Honoured Artist of the RSFSR. On 3 April 2002, by Presidential Decree No. 316, he became People's Artist of the Russian Federation, the only artist in the history of the Orenburg Musical Comedy Theatre to receive that title. He collected regional and union prizes including "Orenburg Lyre," "Idol," "Actor," and "For Creative Youth."

In a 2015 interview marking a benefit, he said he could not imagine his life without the theatre, hoped God would grant him health to continue, and described operetta as a genre you almost have to be born into: singing, dancing, playing from the heart, and giving "part of your heart irreversibly to the spectator," who must become a participant. He loved Kalman, Lehar, Neapolitan songs, and Soviet composers, and told a story of singing Gazmanov's "Officers" with colleague Aleksandr Vasilyev for a room of serious men who climbed on stage, embraced, and wept. His mother had wanted medicine for him, like a famous physician cousin who worked with cosmonauts. Once she saw him on stage and, after the Honoured Artist notice appeared in Soviet Culture, she sat proudly in the second row with flowers saying, "That is my son."

RU Wikipedia lists his active years as 1963 to 2014. In his final years a prolonged illness kept him off the stage, though colleagues said he still followed the company's life. He died on 8 September 2026 in Orenburg Oblast at the age of 81. The theatre and the regional culture ministry announced the death the same day, calling him talented, wise, endlessly devoted to art, and a mentor to younger actors. A farewell was set for 12:00 on 10 September 2026 at the House of Farewell on Montazhnikov Street, 29B, in Orenburg. A specific medical diagnosis beyond prolonged illness was not made public. Burial place was not made public in the open national reports used for this memorial.

This memorial is for Aleksandr Kirillovich Pashchenko (1945-2026), People's Artist of Russia of the Orenburg Musical Comedy Theatre, also known as Александр Кириллович Пащенко. It is not for other men named Alexander or Aleksandr Pashchenko outside this Orenburg operetta artist.