Though his songs were never overtly political, the freshness and independence of Okudzhava's artistic voice presented a subtle challenge to Soviet cultural authorities, who were thus hesitant for many years to give him official recognition.

His father served as a political commissar during the Civil War and as a high-ranking Communist Party member thereafter, under the protection of Sergo Ordzhonikidze (1886-1937).

His uncle Vladimir Okudzhava was an anarchist and terrorist who left the Russian Empire after a failed attempt to assassinate the Kutaisi governor.

[3] Shalva, Okudzhava's father, was arrested in February 1937 during the Great Purge, accused of Trotskyism and wrecking.

[4] In 1942, at the age of 17, 9th-grader Bulat Okudzhava volunteered[5] for the Red Army infantry, and from 1942 he participated in the war against Nazi Germany.

These unofficial recordings were widely copied as magnitizdat, and spread across the USSR and Poland, where other young people picked up guitars and started singing the songs for themselves.

Though Okudzhava's songs were not published by any official media organization until the late 1970s, they quickly achieved enormous popularity, especially among the intelligentsia – mainly in the USSR at first, but soon among Russian-speakers in other countries as well.

During the 1980s, he also published a great deal of prose (his novel The Show is Over won him the Russian Booker Prize in 1994).

By the 1980s, recordings of Okudzhava performing his songs finally began to be officially released in the Soviet Union, and many volumes of his poetry were also published.