Sofia Rotaru celebrates her 75th birthday in a foreign land

On August 7, Sofia Rotaru celebrates her 75th birthday. It can be assumed that against the backdrop of previous anniversaries, this landmark “half-anniversary” will be more than modest for the singer. And she will mark him not at home.

Sofia Mikhailovna met her sixtieth birthday in accordance with her status as a musical legend. A big reception at the Livadia Palace in Yalta, the Order of Merit of the II degree from the hands of the President of Ukraine Viktor Yushchenko, and then pompous shows in the Kremlin with the participation of all the stars.

On her seventieth birthday, the singer gave a concert in Baku as part of the Heat festival, and the television version of this show was shown several times on several federal air channels. Directly on her birthday, Sofia Mikhailovna then received a congratulatory telegram from the Kremlin.

No official activity is expected around the beautiful number 75, although even last year many, both in Russia and Ukraine, were in high spirits waiting for the upcoming date. Without exaggeration, the epic appearances of the superstar at the New Wave festival in Sochi and at the Olympic Stadium in Kyiv at the grand celebration of the 30th anniversary of Ukraine’s independence only dispersed the musical appetites of fans and just music lovers.

However, the serenity of rosy plans soon collapsed, and not only for one single singer. Some time ago, Sofia Rotaru left Ukraine and is now, according to rumors, is in Italy, mournfully while away unexpected leisure time in a rented villa. Most likely, the superstar is not up to creative activity, and now Sofia Mikhailovna gets into the news not at all about music.

In March of this year, the singer’s son Ruslan and grandson Anatoly were detained while trying to cross the Ukrainian-Moldovan border. Under a rule introduced in Ukraine, men between the ages of eighteen and sixty cannot leave the country without official permission. Hotheads and pufferfish immediately saw in the actions of 51-year-old Ruslan and 28-year-old Anatoly an attempt to desert. However, later a more peaceful version surfaced, according to which the grandson of the famous singer urgently needed a medical operation, and it was for her sake that such a desperate attempt was made to leave the country.

As a result, the sick Anatoly was still allowed to leave for treatment, he underwent a complex operation on the intestines. However, having recovered, the frivolous young man could not resist and posted on social networks glamorous photos in patent leather shoes and a fashionable coat against the backdrop of the beauties of Paris, which, of course, caused another wave of anger among many Ukrainians, which rebounded on the eminent pop grandmother. Meanwhile, Rotaru’s son is law-abidingly in Kyiv, fulfilling all the requirements of martial law, and his wife and mother Tolya moved to Europe to take care of a recovering child.

Sofia Mikhailovna herself, unlike many Ukrainian artists, does not make harsh political statements, she only published a post at the end of February in which she noted that the tragic events of recent days were tearing her heart apart and wished her subscribers strength and peace. However, due to the excitability of the situation, this turned out to be enough for the famous singer to be accused of “indifference” and “callingness” in her homeland, and in Russia as a uniform enemy. Fear, of course, has big eyes, but when the need to report to the competent authorities about the facts of listening to songs performed by Rotaru in Russia, as well as other “unfriendly” artists, is seriously discussed, I want to send the authors of such appeals to the doctor.

Despite everything, Sofia Rotaru continues to be a favorite artist for millions of Russians, the one who gave many wonderful experiences associated with her songs.

In 1971, she literally broke into the all-Union broadcasts in the film “Chervona Ruta”. Folk can be awarded with any term, but it’s hard to call this genre sexy. Nevertheless, Rotaru presented him just like that. Rarely has nature rewarded any of the pop stars with an irresistible appearance and voice of such strength and purity.

It was as if she was born to unite people with songs and did it both as a singer and as an actress. In the image of almost a rocker, she performed “For those who are at sea” in the film “Soul” and Mikhail Boyarsky and “Time Machine” stood next to her on stage. For 1981, it was incredibly cool, given the unreliability in those days of the status of rock music as such and the semi-persecuted, as, indeed, now, the position of the “Time Machine”.

It’s hard to say how many tears shed under “Lavender”, which Rotaru sang with Jaak Yola, and how many heels were broken at the dances under “Moon, Moon”, “It was, but it’s gone”, “Only this is not enough” and other Europop hits authorship of Vladimir Matetsky, how many flowers and delights the singer collected everywhere she performed.

In songs, Rotaru often denoted her Ukrainian identity, but for the entire Soviet Union she was her own. She performed songs by legendary and eminent authors – Ivasyuk, Babadzhanyan, Pauls, Zatsepin, was not by title, but by the reception of the public a people’s artist in every Soviet republic, and in the nineties she even joked about the fact that at a meeting in Belovezhskaya Pushcha, where dissolved the Soviet Union, discussed how to divide Rotaru.

Now Sofia Rotaru does not have the opportunity to perform in front of her Russian fans, but there is no doubt that the singer will receive many happy birthday greetings. True fans will always be with her, she is still “our Sonya” for them. A large fan community of Alla Pugacheva also experiences similar feelings, no matter how they call Primadonna in various shameless media.

At Pugacheva’s big anniversary concert in 2009, two legends performed the tATu hit “They Won’t Catch Us” as a duet, and thirteen years later the singers are close again in many respects and it’s still not so easy to catch up with them. Both are not at home, both are in rented European villas, both are expressively silent, but in such a way that their silence sounds deafening than other public manifestos. And probably both hope for the best. Like all of us.