Pyotr Starchik

Pyotr Petrovich Starchik was born on 8 August 1938 in Ruzayevka, in the Mordovian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. He began composing as a teenager, writing his first song, to a poem by Alexander Pushkin, in 1955. He studied at Moscow State University for two years and then left to work, taking a series of jobs as a storekeeper at the Institute of Psychology of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences, a driver and a church watchman.

Starchik set the verse of Russian and foreign poets from antiquity to his own day, among them Marina Tsvetaeva, Osip Mandelstam, Maximilian Voloshin, Nikolai Klyuev, Varlam Shalamov, Sasha Chorny and Olga Sedakova, as well as Polish and Chinese poets. From the 1970s he performed several times a week, almost always at concerts in private flats, because official concerts were all but impossible for a singer who championed banned poets.

In the early 1970s he also made and distributed anti-Soviet leaflets. He was arrested in April 1972, ruled insane after an examination at the Serbsky Institute and sent by the Moscow City Court for compulsory treatment at the Kazan special psychiatric hospital. Human rights defenders including Andrei Sakharov campaigned for him. He was moved to an ordinary psychiatric hospital in Moscow in November 1974 and discharged in 1975.

Back in Moscow he held weekly Friday concerts at his flat in Tyoply Stan. In September 1976 he was detained and forcibly hospitalised again, this time because of the concerts. Campaigners in the USSR and abroad protested and a committee called Freedom for Pyotr Starchik was formed in Moscow; he was released in November 1976. In 1977 he contributed the essay Fate and Song to the samizdat almanac Voskresenye. His only official appearance in Soviet times came in 1981 at a club on Volkhonka in Moscow, at an evening of children's poetry announced only by a handwritten notice.

Under perestroika he could at last perform to large audiences, and in 1987 he joined the editorial board of the independent Moscow weekly Express-Khronika. In 1995 the Ostrov studio issued Poruka dobra, recordings of his home concerts from the early 1980s.

For many years Starchik worked as a watchman at the Moscow church of Saints Cosmas and Damian. He later lived in the village of Nikolo-Pogost in the Gorodets district of Nizhny Novgorod region. During the coronavirus pandemic he moved to France with his wife Saida, with whom he gave home concerts and sang duets. In February 2022 he was treated in intensive care for thrombosis and underwent surgery.

Pyotr Starchik died on 24 October 2026, aged 88. News of his death was first shared that evening by Pyotr Trubetskoy, president of the Archive Service of the Author's Song charitable foundation, and his wife Saida confirmed it. TASS reported it the next day, quoting a person close to him: "Yesterday Pyotr was gone." Reports placed his death in France, with the magazine VOICE naming Alencon and NEWSru.co.il naming Paris. The cause of death and funeral arrangements were not made public.

Starchik is remembered as a bard of the Soviet underground whose flat concerts kept banned and half forgotten poetry alive for listeners in Moscow's intelligentsia and human rights circles, and whose two psychiatric confinements became a cause for campaigners against punitive psychiatry. The translator Svetlana Panich said that to his last day he gathered into his songs the most honest, piercing and steadfast poetry of the twentieth century. Around 2,000 of his settings of poems survive in recordings and private collections.