Адвокатский вальс

Advokatskij vals

Yuliy Kim (born 1936), a poet, songwriter, and screenwriter, is one of the foremost Soviet dissidents. His Korean father, Kim Cher San, was executed as an “enemy of the people” in 1937 and his mother was sentenced as a “family member of a traitor of the Motherland” to five years in a Gulag labor camp and three years of exile; as a result Yuliy Kim did not see his mother until the age of 9. After graduating from a pedagogical institute, Kim taught history, literature, and geography in the Kamchatka Peninsula in the Russian Far East, but in the mid-1960s, he joined the dissident movement, which cost him his job. For years, Kim earned a living by writing songs for plays and movies under a pseudonym, as his Korean name was unacceptable for the censorship. In 1956, he started to write protest songs (both lyrics and music), which he performed while playing the acoustic guitar. Since the early 1960s, Kim has been one of the most popular Russian bards, singers-songwriters whose lyrics often carry a subversive meaning. Among his most rebellious songs is “Advocates’ Waltz”, written shortly after the trial of the human rights’ advocates who protested the Soviet military response to Prague Spring