Nadezhda Plevitskaya

Her repertoire included, alongside popular ditties of mediocre quality, superb examples of Russian peasant folksong from Kursk province as well as songs of city life that are still meaningful today.

Her manner of performance showed great sincerity, rich intonation, expressive declamation, and an unusually subtle and deep feeling for the beauty of Russian speech.She later married a Lieutenant Shangin of the Cuirassiers, but he died in battle in January 1915.

Plevitskya made concert tours throughout Europe (and, in 1926, to the United States, where she was accompanied by the composer, Sergei Rachmaninoff), while her husband, General Skoblin, took a leading role in a White émigré organization, the ROVS.

Plevitskaya, a woman known to love the fine furs and jewelry worn by affluent women in the West, persuaded Skoblin to work for the Soviet Union.

However, their success soon resulted in periodic covert trips back to the Soviet Union, where she and Skoblin performed well-paid counterintelligence work in Moscow for the NKVD uncovering 'enemies of Stalin' while posing as 'Mr.

[6] Plevitskaya and Skoblin were closely involved in the 1937 abduction of a White general, Yevgeny Miller, who was kidnapped in Paris, drugged and smuggled to Moscow, where he was tortured for nineteen months before he was killed in May 1939.

[2] Alexander Mikhailovich Orlov, a Soviet defector, later claimed that Skoblin was induced to write to her undated love letters, which were later sent to her in prison to ensure her silence.