Matvey Blanter

Matvey Isaakovich Blanter (; 10 February 190327 September 1990) was a Soviet composer, and one of the most prominent composers of popular songs and film music in the Soviet Union. Among many other works, he wrote the famous “Katyusha” (1938), performed to this day internationally. He was active as a composer until 1975, producing more than two thousand songs. Childhood and education Blanter, the son of a Jewish craftsman, was born in the town of Pochep, then in the Chernigov Governorate of the Russian Empire. He studied piano and violin at the Kursk Higher Music School. From 1917 to 1919, he continued his education in Moscow, studying violin and composition. Career Blanter’s first songs were composed in the 1920s. At the time, he wrote light dance and jazz music, including “John Gray” (1923), a foxtrot that became a major hit. In the 1930s, as Soviet culture grew more ideologically strict, Blanter shifted toward writing Soviet propaganda songs. He emerged as one of the creators of the Soviet “mass song”. Some of Blanter’s 1930s songs were styled after the Red Army songs of the Russian Civil War (1918–1921) and mythologized the war’s Bolshevik heroes. The most famous among these are