Barîkina Ludmila

About

Ludmila Barykina, born on January 21, 1953, in the city of Bălți, Republic of Moldova, was an outstanding Soviet and Russian pop singer, possessing a coloratura soprano, who began her musical career in her native country. Raised without a father in a modest family, her mother, a worker at the Palace of Culture in Bălți, noticed her early talent and enrolled her in music school at the age of six, initially for the piano, which she learned by drawing keys on paper due to the lack of an instrument. In the eighth grade, she entered the Bălți music college, then the Chișinău Conservatory, but abandoned her studies to sing in local ensembles such as 'Orion' and the 'Bucuria' jazz orchestra, participating in 1972 in the 'Amber Trumpet' competition in Kaunas, where she won third place. After moving to Leningrad, her career skyrocketed in the 1970s, collaborating with renowned vocal-instrumental ensembles such as 'Chayki', 'Nevsky', 'Dobry Molodtsy', Yuri Antonov's 'Magistral', 'Nadezhda' and, most importantly, 'Vesyolyye Rebyata' (1977-1981), where she was the fourth and final female soloist after Alla Pugacheva. She recorded the emblematic song 'Smyateniye' for David Tukhmanov's conceptual album 'Po volne moyey pamyati' (1976), which brought her national fame, alongside hits like 'Kukla', 'V posledniy raz', 'Nikogda ne poveryu', and 'Ukhodilo leto'. She participated in international festivals such as 'Bratislavská lýra' and the 'Dresdner Schlagerfestival', where she won the audience award, but missed out on a trip to Japan due to political reasons. After 1983, she sang in Moscow restaurants and variety shows, ending her stage career in 1992 with the collapse of the USSR. Ludmila Barykina's personal life was marked by three marriages: the first to a musician from 'Bucuria', the second to guitarist Oleg (Alik) Petrov from 'Dobry Molodtsy', with whom she worked in several ensembles, and the third to Alexander Vedeshkin, who cared for her in her final years. In 1980, she gave birth to twins—Maria and Ivan—their birth and a presumed illness of her son leading to her departure from 'Vesyolyye Rebyata'. She passed away on December 3, 2023, in Moscow at the age of 70, after a long illness caused by a blood infection and the amputation of a leg due to rheumatoid arthritis, thus remaining a discreet yet memorable figure of Soviet pop music, with few remaining video recordings.