There is a monument in the center of Simferopol. At the piano of black marble stands a short man, cast in bronze. This is how the Crimeans immortalized their love for the People's Artist of the USSR Yuri Iosifovich Bogatikov.
Childhood
Yuri Bogatikov was born in 1932 in the mining town of Rykovo in the southeast of Ukraine, its current name is Enakievo. The boy's childhood took place in Slavyansk, Donetsk region. During the war, a mother with children, including nine-year-old Yura, was evacuated to Bukhara. From Uzbekistan, the family returned not to their homeland, but to Kharkov. The father, who went to the front, died heroically.
The first steps
In order to get a specialty in post-war Kharkov, the teenager entered the vocational school of communications. After graduation he worked as a mechanic at the city telegraph. A mother who raised her children on her own needed an assistant and support. All these years, the creative principle was not asleep in Yura, he began to sing from an early age. The young man devoted all his free time to amateur performances and even became a student at the Kharkov Music College. Studies had to be postponed due to conscription. It was performed in the Song and Dance Ensemble of the Pacific Fleet. During this period, Yura was finally convinced of the correctness of his choice. He could not imagine his life without music.
Becoming an artist
After completing his academic education in the vocal class, he started working at the Kharkov Musical Comedy Theater, and then at the Donbass ensemble. For the next three years, the professional vocalist performed at the philharmonic societies of Kharkov and Lugansk. Then he moved to the Crimean Philharmonic, where he remained a soloist for almost two decades. In 1967, the performer was named the best at the song competition of young Ukrainian performers. This victory opened the way for a talented singer with a wonderful velvet baritone to success and recognition. Bogatikov's performances were accompanied by the music of the "Crimea" ensemble, which he directed.
People's glory
The singer first appeared on television in 1969 in a festive concert dedicated to the mining profession. The audience liked the performance of the song "Dark Mounds Are Sleeping" so much that the vocalist became a frequent guest on television and radio. No one doubted his presence on the main stages of the country - he firmly took his place on the stage. A new stage in the song biography of Yuri Bogatikov began.
The performer's repertoire was extensive and consisted of more than 400 works. Most of the songs were dedicated to the defenders of the homeland: "Three tankers", "At an unnamed height", "We are the army of the country." Having survived the severity of the war and the post-war devastation, he subtly felt and understood the content of such works. He loved to sing songs about the navy and was very proud to serve in the Pacific. He considered the theme of the working man to be of no small importance, since he himself grew up at a time when "their fate was checked against the factory whistle." There were works about love for the Fatherland and the beauty of the native land. Not without comic compositions, especially loved by the audience: "Listen, mother-in-law", "A soldier is walking through the city." The listeners liked the romances and lyric songs of the performer: "Burn, burn, my star", "My joy lives", "Crimean dawns", songs about Kerch and Sevastopol. There were always full halls at his concerts, the audience sang along with the artist. Every soloist dreams of performing on a large opera stage, but Bogatikov understood that the song genre was more understandable and loved among ordinary people. To them, he demonstrated all his musicality, range and acting ability. The singer never allowed himself to perform with a phonogram.
The artist recalled with interest the period of his tour, when he shared the concert program with Alla Pugacheva. To conquer the audience, one had to be a showman in front of the audience, although the performer himself did not like this word. The audience “played” with the vocalist, became his “partners”. The best reward was an unbearable pause at the end of the performance, which was followed by thunderous applause. The singer toured a lot around the country and abroad, visited a number of countries in Europe and South America.
Personal life
There were three families in the artist's life, his incredible charisma attracted the opposite sex. The singer met his first wife Lyudmila at the Kharkov Drama Theater, where she performed in the choir. Their joint daughter Victoria followed in the footsteps of her parents and chose a creative destiny. The second wife's name was Raisa. The third marriage took place with Tatiana. Today she works as a director of music programs on one of the TV channels in Moscow.
Remembering the work of Yuri Bogatikov, we can say that his career was successful, and he made a worthy contribution to modern pop art. In addition to the title of People's Artist of the country, which he received in 1985, the singer's piggy bank consisted of numerous awards and prizes in the field of music. He was distinguished by a special ability to be at the right time with the right song.
Last years
For 18 years he represented Ukraine as a member of the Pop Art Council under the USSR Ministry of Culture. Since 1992, Yuri Iosifovich has been organizing festivals and special events.
For a long time, Bogatikov remained an adherent of the communist ideology and was a member of the party, he was attracted by the "society of social justice". The singer demonstrated his principled civic stand in 1994, when he headed the Rodina public organization. She considered the revival of the Soviet Union to be her main political task.
The performer spent most of his life in Crimea. In one of his interviews, Yuri Iosifovich said that he constantly felt like a man from the provinces, deeply vulnerable. He gave up apartments in Kiev and Moscow, where he had a complete "carte blanche". Bogatikov was very worried about the development of culture on the peninsula, especially when there was an acute issue of lack of funding for these purposes. He regularly attended the performances of the Crimean Symphony Orchestra and theatrical premieres.
The artist passed away in 2002 in Simferopol, the cause was cancer. As a legacy, he left a disc of songs "Krasnaya Kalina" and audio albums of the cycle "Male conversation". The annual Bogatikov song contest for young performers is held in the Crimean capital.
