Lyudmila Zykina lived a beautiful life
Photo: GLOBAL LOOK PRESS.
“Orenburg scarf”, “From far away the Volga River flows”… You say the words of these songs and immediately the powerful and chesty voice of Lyudmila Zykina will sound in your head. People’s Artist of the USSR. Number one singers in the Russian song genre.
Lyudmila Zykina lived a beautiful life. As she once told me in an interview: “I lived an interesting, complex and beautiful life! There was so much joy, love and happiness in her! I have traveled all over the world, visited all continents. I’ve been to Australia alone three times and Japan ten times. And there is nothing to say about my native country: I crossed it several times from west to east, from north to south…”
He achieved everything thanks to his talent. She had no connections or connections. Born in Moscow on June 10, 1929 in a simple family. His father was a technician in a bakery factory, his mother was a nurse in a hospital. We lived in Cheryomushki, then a suburb. During the war years, Zykina worked as a turner at a machine tool plant, as a nurse in a military hospital, as a seamstress in the Kashchenko psychiatric hospital, and sewed leaflets at a printing house. Working bone. But her voice is naturally such that you can recognize her among a thousand.
June 10 – 95 years since the birth of Lyudmila Zykina, queen of Russian song
Photo: GLOBAL LOOK PRESS.
LOVED DIAMONDS
When she became a famous singer throughout the country, several rumors circulated about her. Which had the favor of the Kremlin leaders. She was a close friend of the Minister of Culture of the USSR, Ekaterina Furtseva. She was reputed to be Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev’s favorite singer. To which Zykina replied: “Was I Brezhnev’s favorite singer? “I don’t know, I wasn’t informed about this, but he was always present at my concerts in the Kremlin Palace of Congresses.”
Talk of friendship with the powers that be still pales next to his talent. And… with the brilliance of the diamonds from it.
After her death, Zykina’s jewelry collection was valued at millions of dollars. Things are unique. Lyudmila Georgievna most often bought them not in stores, not even under the counter, but by hand. Antique jewelry. They said Zykina bought antique earrings with Kashmir sapphires and diamonds from the daughter of a smuggler from Odessa. She later (in the late 60s) paid the price of a Zhiguli for them. Her admirers, including politicians such as Heydar Aliyev and Kim Jong Il, gave her unique copies. She had jewelry from the family of Indian maharajas. They even said that only her earrings were ever worn by Empress Maria Feodorovna (mother of Nicholas II). There were also things made to order in a single copy.
It seemed that Zykina had it all.
Photo: GLOBAL LOOK PRESS.
BAD HEIRS
It seemed that Zykina had it all: fame, talent, wealth, diamonds… She was married several times. It is true that not a single marriage produced children.
But after his death, everything that had been acquired through backbreaking work (this is not ironic) was lost… or wasted by frivolous heirs. Lyudmila Georgievna did not leave a will, her multimillion-dollar inheritance went to her nephews: Sergei, Ekaterina and Georgiy Zykin, very peculiar people. In some ways naive, in some ways selfish. Naive and selfish. In the history of Zykina’s inheritance, they were nicknamed “slum millionaires.” Even before the death of his famous aunt, they lost their apartments in Moscow and moved from the capital to the Penza region. Although, according to lawyer Evgeniy Balelin, they once lived on Kotelnicheskaya embankment in the famous high-rise building in the same house as their aunt. Lyudmila Georgievna acquired this elite apartment, either three or four rooms, for her unfortunate half-brother Alexander and her family (her nephews themselves). After them, the apartment somehow became the property of her assistant Tatyana Svinkova. Lyudmila Georgievna bought a hotel apartment for each of her nephews.
– But at the time of Zykina’s death, only Ekaterina had the apartment. Her brothers, Sergei and Georgiy, have already sold theirs. And Katya sold the apartment a little later, when her “advisors” told her that “she needed money to accept her inheritance,” recalls Ekaterina Zykina’s lawyer, Evgeniy Balelin. – Katya believed everything.
– Were Zykina’s nephews really such naive people? Could someone fool them?
– They were naive because of their characteristics. And, as often happens, there were people who were not at all naive. These people artificially created a rift between the nephews. They became rich thanks to them…
“Canasta” gold brooch Photo: gelos.ru
EMPRESS EARRINGS
The main scandal broke out around Zykina’s jewelry, which, after the singer’s death, was arbitrarily taken to the dacha by her assistant Tatyana Svinkova. The police, at the request of Lyudmila Georgievna’s nephews, came to Svinkova’s house to search it and seized Zykina’s property. Svinkov donated a part voluntarily.
They say some of the jewelry disappeared without a trace. Well, what they found at the assistant’s dacha was auctioned by the heirs through a fund they created at the behest of the lawyer Georgiy Levchuk (he represented the interests of Sergei Zykin, the eldest of the nephews). They then said that this ingenious fund was needed to facilitate the withdrawal of money from the sale of jewelry. But it did not work: the results of the first auction (which took place in 2012) were canceled at the request of the prosecutor’s office. In this story there were many subplots and secondary characters: “KP” described the family saga in detail.
In fact, Zykina’s nephews promised to open a museum in their apartment on Kotelnicheskaya embankment. But in 2013 my aunt’s luxurious three-ruble note was sold. Instead of a museum, a memorial plaque was hung in the house: Lyudmila Zykina lived here.
Set with diamonds and garnets Photo: gelos.ru
It was not immediately possible to divide the money from the sale of the apartment equally: Catherine received nothing. She continued to live very poorly. And she hired lawyer Evgeny Balelin to help her restore justice.
“In June 2013, a second auction was held,” recalls Evgeniy Balelin. – There were no top-level jewelry there. Sergei appropriated the money from the sale of things. I don’t know if he shared it with his brother Georgy, but Katya didn’t get anything either.
Catherine began to sue Sergei: she demanded that he pay her share from the sale of the apartment and the diamonds. The cost of Zykina’s jewelry was estimated at 267 million rubles. The court ordered Sergei to pay his sister a third: 89 million rubles. The “misunderstanding” has been resolved. Katya’s compensation was not paid in money, but in diamond earrings, as they say, the most expensive in Zykina’s collection. These antique earrings contain 72 diamonds, some of them very large. Museum quality item.
“We have not found confirmation that these earrings ever belonged to Empress Maria Feodorovna, as rumored,” says Evgeny Balelin. – We did a gemological examination of the stones. The earrings are really valuable. But they weren’t worth 89 million.
Finally, before the coronavirus pandemic, in December 2019, there was a third auction. It was made by the “12th Chair” auction house. There was a pre-sale exhibition at the Historical Museum. At that time, the nephews sold their aunt’s treasures as agreed.
Transformable gold brooch Photo: gelos.ru
– It was then that the nephews finally signed an agreement on the division of inherited property. This was Catherine’s condition, which Sergei and George were forced to accept. Some things sold, others didn’t. Of those that were sold, not all were repurchased, recalls Evgeniy Balelin. – After the auction, Catherine received the money and her share of her jewelry and went home with them.
– And those famous earrings that supposedly belonged to Maria Feodorovna?
-She didn’t put them up for auction. This was her condition. But then she herself sold them to a Zykina fan, not to Moscow.
After the auction, the brothers and sister stopped communicating: there was nothing left to share.
SUDDEN DEATH OF AN HEIR
Two years ago Ekaterina Zykina died. She was 42 years old. Still young. Before her death, she fell into the hands of scammers again and lost everything. Her younger brother, Georgiy, detained her son Artem.
– Katya stopped fighting for her aunt’s inheritance. She no longer needed my services. When we broke up with her, she had an apartment in the center of Moscow and an impressive foreign currency bank account,” recalls Evgeny Balelin. -But then a strange story happened… Katya went to Dagestan and “there she found her destiny”, she got married and came with her husband to Moscow. I was told she died in April 2022 from Covid. At the time of her death, she no longer had an apartment (again), no money, and her bank account was closed. The inheritance case was opened in the Penza region, where Catherine moved again before her death.
Antique gold transformable brooch Photo: gelos.ru
According to Evgeny Balelin, Lyudmila Zykina, in addition to diamonds and an apartment, also had shares in trading companies, which also disappeared fraudulently. There were more than a hundred expensive concert dresses, there was a creative archive that has not yet been discovered…
