Mikhail Gulko

Mikhail Gulko was born on 23 July 1931 in Kharkov, then in the Ukrainian SSR. His father was a bookkeeper in the book trade and his mother was an actress, pianist and singer. According to Russian Wikipedia, his grandfather, the second-guild merchant Srul-Nakhim Gulko, owned two Art Nouveau apartment buildings on Klochkovskaya Street in Kharkov, built in 1901 and 1913.

Music filled the home. There was a piano and a gramophone, and Pyotr Leshchenko was among the boy's favourite singers. He sang at school evenings to his mother's accompaniment, then learned the accordion and played at dances. At the start of the Second World War he and his mother were evacuated to Chelyabinsk in the Urals, where he heard a legless sailor singing a war song to a garmon in the market, a memory he carried all his life. He lived in Kharkov until 1968.

His parents pushed him toward a practical career and he chose mining. He began higher education in Kharkov; Argumenty i Fakty reports that he lost his place there, and his Komsomol card, after refusing to go and harvest potatoes on a collective farm. He transferred to the mining faculty of the Moscow Polytechnic Institute and graduated. Years later, in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, he completed the conducting and choral department of a music college.

After graduating he worked for more than ten years as a mining engineer, including at the Yuzhgiproshakht design institute and in Donbas mines, while performing at weddings, parties and restaurants.

In Kamchatka he led a vocal and instrumental ensemble, played the port restaurant Okean and gave concerts for sailors. He met the bard Yuri Kukin there and worked with Mikhail Shufutinsky. Before emigrating he also led the orchestra at the Rusalka restaurant in the Hermitage Garden, where Sergei Korzhukov also worked.

In 1980 he emigrated to the United States on an Israeli visa and settled in New York. He found work by walking into restaurants with his accordion and playing, and became a star of the Brighton Beach restaurant scene. His albums Sinee nebo Rossii (1981) and Sozhzhennye mosty (1984), both produced by Shufutinsky, made him famous across the Soviet Union. Later albums included Pesni voennykh let (1985), Zagranitsa (1996), New York Moskva (2003), Na materik (2008) and Nespetye pesni (2014, with a second volume in 2015).

From the early 1990s he toured Russia regularly, worked with Mikhail Krug and others, and hosted the programme Forgotten Melodies. In 2013 he signed with Sweet Rains Records in New York.

Gulko was married three times. His first marriage produced a daughter, Tatiana, who emigrated with her mother in the late 1970s and lived in New York; her calls to her father were a reason he decided to leave the USSR. His third wife, Tatiana Osipova, a former Russian language teacher who lived with him from 1997, was also his director and his main support in old age. He lived in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, near the boardwalk. Friends called him Dyadya Misha (Uncle Misha).

Gulko's repertoire centred on nostalgia, emigration, war, prison and the fate of ordinary people, and on the White Guard romance tradition of songs such as Poruchik Golitsyn and Gospoda ofitsery. Kravchinsky described him as a storyteller who carried forward the tradition of Alexander Vertinsky, Pyotr Leshchenko and Mark Bernes. He performed free of charge in Soviet prisons and camps many times. Ukrainian outlet Glavkom noted after his death that he had not spoken publicly about the war in Ukraine, neither condemning nor supporting Russia.

Radio Shanson called him one of the artists without whom the history of Russian-language chanson cannot be imagined, and he was widely called the godfather of Russian chanson. Songs including Poruchik Golitsyn, Belaya beryoza, Kolyma, Eshelon, Okurochek, Gospoda ofitsery, Kabatsky muzykant, Molodye gody and Murka acquired what Kravchinsky called their canonical sound in his performances. He was a mentor to Mikhail Krug and an early guide to Kravchinsky, who went on to become a leading historian of emigre music. Kravchinsky arranged for a reissue of his memoir with added recollections from his widow, Mikhail Shufutinsky and Anatoly Mogilevsky.

In 2002 the lyricist Mikhail Tanich presented him with the diploma "Academician of Chanson". In 2007 he was a laureate of the Chanson of the Year award. New York State Assembly member Michael Novakhov presented him with an official state citation some years before his death.

Studio albums: Sinee nebo Rossii (1981), Sozhzhennye mosty (1984), Pesni voennykh let (1985), Zagranitsa (1996), New York Moskva (2003), Na materik (2008), Nespetye pesni (2014), Nespetye pesni 2 (2015). Compilations appeared in the Legends of Russian Chanson (1999) and Grand Collection series. A concert film, Sudba emigranta, was released on DVD in 2006, and his memoir of the same name, edited by Maxim Kravchinsky, was published by Dekom in 2009. His recording of Zagranitsa is heard in the film Primadonna Mary. He hosted the radio and television programme Forgotten Melodies and gave a long interview to Dmitry Gordon in 2012.

For decades listeners believed Gulko had been a prisoner in the Gulag, a story that took hold during his Kamchatka years and lent his prison songs an air of confession. He never served a sentence. The myth grew from his frequent unpaid concerts in prisons and camps.

Gulko had withdrawn from public life and stopped performing and recording in his last years. In his final period he was under medical care in a palliative centre. He marked his 95th birthday on 23 July 2026; days later he was too weak to sign more than his name on jubilee newspapers for fans. He died in New York on 11 August 2026, and Radio Shanson announced his death on 12 August. No cause of death was made public. A farewell ceremony took place on 16 August 2026 at the Lisovetsky memorial home in New York, attended by his widow Tatiana Osipova and many figures of the Russian-speaking community. His burial place has not been made public.