The degree to witch the Personality of the Leader is reflect in the country can be quite absurd.
In any Gulag you would find amazing musicians, dancers and so on. But not singer, Stalin liked them to much. The cultural landscape of a country altered by the simple preference of one men.
We don't have everything, people like Ygoda seem to have gone threw the document and removed things that would negatively reflect on him.
This is not true. It took super little searching to find Vadim Kozin and Lidia Ruslanova. And it is not like I would be an expert. The reason I searched was that this anecdote makes zero sense in the context of how Russia under Stalin or Stalin himself operated. Liking something too much would not prevent either from crushing that something hard.
There are lots of examples in which artists that Stalin respected where crushed less hard than one might expect them to be crushed, Zamyatin comes to mind.
Evgeny Zamyatin was not a singer, so I really dont think this proves singers were uniquely safe. Also, reading story, he had contacts which allowed him to get passport and leave as he was persecuted.
The political persecution he was under was not that unusual for times. It strikes me more like "I heard many stories kinda like that" then super unusual.
In any Gulag you would find amazing musicians, dancers and so on. But not singer, Stalin liked them to much. The cultural landscape of a country altered by the simple preference of one men.
We don't have everything, people like Ygoda seem to have gone threw the document and removed things that would negatively reflect on him.