She was the fourth child of Veniamin Yudin, a renowned physiologist and forensic expert, and his first wife, Raisa Yakovlevna Yudina (née Zlatina; 1868–1918).

In 1921–22 Yudina attended lectures at the historical-philological department of Petrograd University and, as a result, completed studies in theology after she had already converted from Judaism to the Orthodox Christian faith in 1919.

[3] After her graduation from the Petrograd Conservatory, Yudina was invited to teach there, which she did until 1930, when she was dismissed from the institution because her religious convictions were unwelcome in an atheist state.

After an incident during one of her recitals in Leningrad, when she read Boris Pasternak's poetry from the stage as an encore, Yudina was banned from performing for five years.

According to an otherwise unsubstantiated story in Solomon Volkov's book Testimony, which claims to represent Shostakovich's memoirs, one night in 1944 Stalin heard a performance of Mozart's Piano Concerto No.

[5] These stories were extensively researched by Elizabeth Wilson, who found no evidence either in Yudina's recorded oeuvre or in Stalin's well-preserved archives, and concluded they were unlikely to be true and attributed them to Shostakovich's predilection for imaginative tales.

Yudina's playing was marked by great virtuosity, spirituality, strength and intellectual rigor, with a highly idiosyncratic style and tone.

Liszt's Weinen und Klagen was phenomenal, but Schubert's B-flat major Sonata, while arresting as an interpretation, was the exact opposite of what it should have been, and I remember a performance of the Second Chopin Nocturne that was so heroic that it no longer sounded like a piano but a trumpet.