Songbird of the OGPU. As the woman became a great singer and a scout
80 years ago, in 1938, began the trial of the one whose fame spread throughout Russia and Europe. The verdict: “Guilty on all counts”.
The second Mata Hari, one of the most talented Russian singers of XX century Nadezhda Plevitskaya was convicted of spying for the Soviet intelligence service and later died in a French prison.
About how favorite of Tsar Nicholas II, Feodor Chaliapin and Sergei Yesenin became a NKVD agent in Paris, says writer and historian of intelligence, counter-intelligence Colonel in resignation Igor Atamanenko.
Of the novices in singer
— Its fate similar stories of Cinderella, whose fairy godmother has become a Russian folk song. Dika Vinnikov was born 17 Jan 1884 in a poor peasant family. “Born on the twelfth and last, and remained there five of us, other the will of God died, she wrote in her autobiographical book “Dezhkin Karagod” (“Nadezhdin dance”). — Started singing from an early age, and singing my heard the villagers”. After his father’s death the family fell into poverty. And her mother gave her in a nunnery. For a long time she did not stay there — had fled to Kiev and appeared in the farce. After the test Diku took a student in the choir, led by Oleksandra Lipkina with “a salary of 18 rubles a month in all ready.”
During a tour of Astrakhan Lipkin kidnapped a rich Persian and the yacht was taken to Baku. The choir soon collapsed. But the Hope was lucky to get a traveling troupe of actors theatre of Warsaw under the direction of Stein.
Dancer of the troupe, the handsome pole Edmund Plewicki proposed to her. However, the Hope for another year kept her maiden honor, and only with the blessing of the mother after the wedding in the Church became his wife. And when the husband, kidnapped the cashier of the company fled, began to sing in the “Choir purses”, then in the famous Moscow restaurant “Yar”. In the fall of 1909 Plevitskaya practiced engagement in the Nizhny Novgorod restaurant, there she saw Leonid Sobinov and offered to speak with the stars — Mathilde Kschessinska and Basil by Kachalov in the local Opera house.
In 1911, she was already on top of the world, which did not reached any Russian peasant. Excitedly about it in the papers, she sings at receptions in Tsarskoye Selo. Nicholas II, moved to tears by her performance, said: “I was told that you never learned to sing. And do not learn. Stay true to who you are. I’ve heard a lot of scientists nightingales, but they were singing to the ear, as you sing for the heart”. And gave her a diamond brooch.