SUMMARY:

During the Stalin period, jazz singer and bandleader Leonid Utesov was one of the Soviet Un-ion’s biggest celebrities. The authorities were uneasy about his celebrity status, which granted him the reputation of a normative Soviet, which he hardly was: a Jew, who first became popular for his performance of criminal songs, and then turning to “bourgeois” and foreign jazz music. Despite Utesov’s universally acknowledged fame, there has been little scholarly interest in why fans were so drawn to him. Drawing upon memoirs of Utesov and his bandmates, records of the Soviet cultural bureaucracy, Utesov’s own recordings, and, most important, the hundreds of fan letters he received during the Stalin period, this article analyzes the ways that Utesov, Soviet cultural elites, and fans constructed, contested, and interpreted his celebrity persona.