Nadezhda Plevitskaya

Nadezhda Vasilievna Plevitskaya (Russian: Надежда Васильевна Плевицкая; born Vinnikova, Russian: Винникова; 17 January 1884 – 1 October 1940) was a popular female Russian singer and a Soviet agent.

Plevitskaya was born Nadezhda Vasilievna Vinnikova to a peasant family in the village of Vinnikovo, near Kursk. She loved to sing, and after two years in a religious chorus, she became a professional singer in Kiev, where she married Edmund Plewicki, a Polish dancer. Soon, they moved to Moscow, where she began singing in the well-known Yar restaurant, whose specialty was gypsy bands with beautiful female singers. While on tour, at a concert in 1909, at the Nizhny Novgorod fair, she was heard by the great tenor Leonid Sobinov. He brought her to the attention of a wider public, which soon included the tsar's family as well as the opera singer Feodor Chaliapin.

A Russian song site says:

She later married a Lieutenant Shangin of the Cuirassiers, but he died in battle in January 1915. After the October Revolution, she became a communist and sang for the troops of the Red Army. In 1919, she was captured by a unit of the White Army, commanded by General Nikolai Skoblin, who married her in exile in Turkey after the defeat of the White Army.

Plevitskya made concert tours throughout Europe (and, in 1926, to the United States, where she was accompanied by the composer, Sergei Rachmaninoff), while her husband, General Skoblin, took a leading role in a White émigré organization, the ROVS. It was there that Rachmaninoff heard her sing the song "You, My Cerise, My Rouge" (Белилицы, румяницы вы мои; Belilitsy, rumyanitsy vy moyi), which he used as the basis of the last of his Three Russian Songs for chorus and orchestra. However, neither career produced much income for Plevitskaya or Skoblin.

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