A Superstar
Evokes a Superpower
Alison Smale
The New York Times, 28 February 2000
ATLANTIC CITY, Feb. 26 - Some 12,000 Russian-Americans went home today - to the Trump Taj Mahal.
Not for them, at least tonight, the brash glitter of the casinos. Tonight, in the concert hall behind the gambling tables, there was only one temptress: Alla Pugacheva, the self-styled goddess of Russian pop, Moscow's Tina Turner with a hint of Edith Piaf, whose songs have given voice to the yearnings of millions.
If you have not heard this voice, it is because you are not Russian - or, to be more exact, a onetime citizen of the Soviet Union. Back there, and among the increasing millions of emigres who have ventured into the wide world from that once-closed one, there was and is only one superstar: Alla.
By various counts, in a country where many people live on $100 a month or less, she has sold 150 million to 200 million records. She was decorated by the last Soviet president, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, and, on her 50th birthday last April, by the first Russian president, Boris N. Yeltsin. Rare is the Russian television day that passes without one of her many videos flashing across the screen.
In the gray Soviet era, Alla was a blaze of color and life.
She has big hair (red in most of her publicity photos, but tonight a mass of teased and tousled blondish curls), a big voice, billowing concert costumes and a slightly outlandish mouth that can utter anything from an obscenity to a religious blessing. She has never particularly hidden her various travails with weight and appearance; now, at 50, she simply tells her fans - many of whom have aged and billowed with her - that it's O.K. to be older, and rounder.
For this kind of honesty, particularly in a system that elevated The Lie to a political creed, she was adored. Even those who recoil at her vulgarity never fail to praise her talent. Her music - a mixture of pop, rock, and Gypsy-based Russian fold with sentimental lyrics that are nearly impossible to translate - largely depicts a woman struggling with her passions, a woman wronged, but determined to go on.
"Unfortunately, we have been unhappy in our lives much more than happy," said Rachel Shifrin, who arrived 13 years ago from Soviet Georgia and today took a bus from Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, to the New Jersey casino. "I'm 50 now, and she's 50. She has pain, I have pain. You know, she has something that touches us where so few people do." Her eyes glistened as she brought a hand up to her heart.
"It's not just her great voice," said Valentina Kolomeer, who held her miniature poodle, Kity, as fur-hatted tour-bus leaders marshaled the crowds that flocked to today's two concerts from Brighton Beach. "She is also the only woman who achieved everything by herself, even starving to reach her goals."
In the 6,000-seat concert hall, where tickets went for $35 to $250, and henna, glitter, furs and teased hair were de rigueur, the feeling was the same.
"We knew her back there," said one voice from a matronly trio - Isabelle, Fayina, and Zinaida - referring to the Soviet land of their younger days. "We love her, and remember, " another one said. "Memories - for us, she's really THE artist." A warm smile.
"It's simply a whole epoch," Zinaida concluded.
Alla Borisovna, as every Russian speaker affectionately knows her, has been singing their song for more than a whole epoch. She first hit the Soviet airwaves at age 16, then started to tour. By the time she was 20, she was married (for the first of four times). By 24, a divorced mother. In the mid-1970's, she shot to Soviet bloc fame with a triumphal performance at the Golden Orpheus song contest in Bulgaria - an unknown event in the West, but a fixture of the often grey, sometimes maudlin universe created behind the Iron Curtain by Communism.
Unlike the system that spawned her, Ms. Pugacheva has survived. Indeed, to judge by the media chronicles of her native land, which have followed her every affair, and seemingly every cigarette or vodka shot that lent rasp to her voice, she could be the original owner of Gloria Gaynor's motto, "I Will Survive."
In Soviet times, when the state kept concerts cheap and even a superstar was not allowed immense personal wealth, Alla Pugacheva regularly filled sports stadiums on her concert tours. Now, she admits, hard times and rising costs have made that harder at home. (Though, she adds with a smile, "I'll always get 10,000 people.")
For that, the world outside has opened up; after she concludes her current six-concert United States and Canada tour on Sunday in Chicago, she's off to Israel, where, as a Russian-born Israeli couple in the audience noted with pride, "She's seen more often than here in your country," playing to the memories of a million Soviet emigres.
Tonight, toward the end, Ms. Pugacheva was midsong, again down in the crowd, when her husband and producer, Philip Kirkorov, appeared. Wildly popular in his own right as a Russian rock star, he is the author of what amounts to a hit hymn to Alla ("My little hare, I'm your little rabbit"). Tonight, tall and clad in leather, he filmed her with a digital video camera. Linking arms and looking through the lens, the couple mounted the stage as if it were part of their living room, making home movies before an audience of thousands.
Next, one of the privileged men allowed at various points to dance with their idol, or to bestow another bouquet, offered something special - a glittering tiara "to crown the queen of Russian song." With unfailing instinct, Ms. Pugacheva turned to her fans. "Does it suit me?" she asked. "I don't look like a waitress?" Then, she offered up another song: "I stepped on the throne of love, a throne made of ice."
She finished with an encore with her daughter, the budding pop star Christina Orbakaite, as waiflike as her mother is buxom. Alla bade farewell. "I experienced happiness," she said, glowing. "I can't exist without you. Thank you. Be with us forever. Until the next time. In the name of the mother, the daughter, and the Holy Spirit."
Backstage, dressed in far quieter clothes, far simpler hair framing her face and heavy eyes, she received the star's flow of fans, patiently posing for pictures, dispensing and signatures. How does it feel to be the empress of Russian pop? "I'm used to it," she purred. And then, with an irony unsuspected on stage, added, "Of course, that's a really modest little answer."
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29 September 2000
site author: Eric Norton
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