[1] In the 1980s, he became famous throughout the Soviet Union for his songs about life as a Russian émigré in New York in Brighton Beach.

[2] Vilen Ivanovich Tokarev was born in the small Cossack village of Chernyshev in Adyghe Autonomous Oblast, North Caucasus Krai, Soviet Union, on 11 November 1934.

Nikolay Nikitsky, a film actor and singer very popular at the time, invited me to accompany him at his concerts.

[8] In Murmansk Tokarev worked as a singer at the restaurant White Nights where he led the music band Nord-West.

On one occasion, he was fired from a job as a courier on Wall Street because of his poor English;[6] afterward he studied the language on his own with an audio cassette course.

His second album, V Shumnom Balagane (1981), full of humorous songs stylized as urban folklore of the Russian criminal underground, made him famous in the Russian-speaking community of New York.

[6][16] The restaurant where Tokarev worked as a singer started to pay him well and soon he was able to buy a flat on the seashore and a car.

Tokarev worked as a singer in three big Russian-speaking restaurants on Brighton Beach: Sadko, Primorsky, and Odessa.

[17] Back in the Soviet Union, his songs about the United States written from the perspective of a Russian émigré also became very popular.

He lived in the famous Kotelnicheskaya Embankment Building[25] and was named a Honorary Resident of Moscow's Tagansky Raion.