Natella Boltyanskaya at Kultura

Natella Boltyanskaya at Kultura

Natella Boltyanskaya is the author and performer of the song Babi Yar, written to her own lyrics — a song during which audiences often rise to their feet. Her song dedicated to Chiune Sugihara, one of the Righteous Among the Nations, is performed in Japan at the Sugihara Memorial Synagogue. In 1991, broadcasts of Echo of Moscow were interrupted in the middle of her songs during the turbulent events of that era.

Valeriya Novodvorskaya called Natella the successor to Alexander Galich. Her songs leave no one indifferent — they make people laugh, cry, reflect, and remember. Beyond her music, Boltyanskaya is a remarkable storyteller, and there is hardly a difficult or controversial question she would leave unanswered.

Radio Liberty has staged Boltyanskaya’s plays on two occasions. In recent years, while living in Israel, she released a new album of songs, published works in literary journals, and recently saw the publication of her prose collection by Freedom Letters, a publishing house known for contemporary Russian- and Ukrainian-language literature.

It is often said that Boltyanskaya knows more about the Jackson–Vanik Amendment than Jackson and Vanik themselves combined — and there is some truth to that. For four years, she served as a visiting researcher at the Law Library of the United States Congress.