THE VOICE OF THE SOVIET STATE

This Yuri Levitan entry is being posted on my blog in commemoration of the twenty-ninth anniversary of his death. It is best read in conjunction with the Arkady Raikin entry Stalin’s Favorite Comic, posted on June 19^th, 2011.

Both Levitan and Raikin were outstandingly distinguished Soviet Jews, icons, if I may use the word, of the Soviet state. Both were noticed and launched into exceptional prominence by Stalin personally. Both represent more than themselves alone, but, together with Stalin, they had become national symbols. All three of them illustrate my point about personality cults in totalitarian societies, that is, not just the cult of the leader but a special appreciation of all truly exceptional personalities. And finally, once again reminding the reader about the fact that both these men, Raikin and Levitan, were very explicitly and unmistakably Jewish (or should I say Yiddish?), yet were thus wholeheartedly embraced by the totality of the Russian people, young and old, city dwellers and villagers, college graduates and manual laborers, who is it talking about Russian ingrown anti-Semitism?! The Russians love their genius, whether he looks Russian or non-Russian, Turkish or Tatar, Jewish or Negro, the last referring to Russia’s greatest poet and writer Alexander Pushkin.

And indeed, you couldn’t possibly be more Yiddish than Yudka Berkovich, the son of Ber Levi, who was to become known and literally revered by every Russian as The Dictor Yuri Borisovich Levitan (1914-1983). Born to the family of a provincial Jewish tailor, he possessed an exceptionally strong and expressive voice of a unique timbre, and at the age of seventeen (in 1931) he came to Moscow to study acting, but was not admitted to the acting school, not so much on account of his heavy provincial accent, which could be easily corrected by special training, as for the lack of acting talent. The admission panel, however, recognized his unusual vocal ability, and rather than sending him back to wherever he came from, a meeting was arranged for him with the great Russian actor Vasily Kachalov, who on hearing him speak was so impressed that he offered his personal help to the aspiring young talent. No, Levitan was not acting material. But he was obviously a unicum, and his exceptional voice was that which made him one.

As a result of this conversation, Kachalov recommended him for the class of radio announcers (“dictors”), where Yudka Levitan by sheer hard work, and with the help of his able teachers, got rid of his accent, and developed his own incomparable style and a singular diction. At the age of just nineteen, he became a radio announcer, and, according to the story that sounds much like a typical legend, but is actually quite true, he immediately caught the attention of Stalin, who happened one day to hear him on the radio. Extremely impressed, Stalin demanded that this particular announcer, and nobody else, must read for the Soviet nation his, Stalin’s, upcoming Report at the opening of the Seventeenth Congress of the Communist Party of the USSR, to be delivered the very next day, January 26, 1934.

This demand created a nightmarishly intense situation for the sorely inexperienced nineteen-year-old, but Levitan passed the test with flying colors, delivering the text on such short notice without a single mistake, with a uniformly perfect diction and intonation. Stalin was very pleased, and he made sure that his newest protégé’s meteoric career as Dictor Number One of the USSR would be assured, with no opposition from the bureaucratic establishment, or from some envious senior colleagues of this “upstart” youngster in the announcing business.

Levitan’s voice went on to become the most recognizable voice in the USSR especially during the war with Nazi Germany when he was the designated announcer of all official daily releases of the SovInformBureau. To be fair, the people all over the Soviet Union would have been crowding around the public loudspeakers anyway to hear the announcements from the Kremlin each time, usually several times a day, whenever such announcements were expected to be made, and they would have cherished any voice that was making them, but the fact that Levitan was selected for this announcing job, and the fact that he indeed deserved such an honor, speaks for itself, and, as they say, the rest is history.

And Levitan had become that history. For many years after the war he would be assigned to make the most important announcements for the Kremlin. The classic recordings of Yuri Levitan’s radio announcements subsequently entered the ‘gold fund’ of Soviet Art, as he himself was named People’s Artist of the USSR as a modest acknowledgment of the long-evident fact that he had become an immortal national legend.