In a candid conversation with HABER.ru, Alla Pugacheva spoke about the era when the Soviet system tightly controlled earnings for artists, including herself and her late-90s ex-husband, Evgeny Boldin. The diva described how a solo concert income flowed to the state, limiting what she and others could personally keep from their performances. The memory stands in sharp contrast to the public image of a star with immense drawing power across the Soviet Union.
According to Boldin, the numbers from a single show reveal a stark economic arrangement. He recalled that for a solo concert, Pugacheva received seven rubles and 50 kopecks, a small fraction when weighed against the scale of audience demand. He also noted that ticket prices in other cities could be higher, such as a stadium show in Tbilisi where a ticket for ten thousand seats cost ten rubles. The pattern, he said, demonstrated that the earnings from concerts were largely absorbed by the state, while the artist’s immediate income remained modest.
The ex-husband described a system of monitoring by state bodies, including the Control and Supervisory Service, the Ministry of Finance, and the fiscal authorities. He claimed these agencies would descend on the host city about two weeks before a planned performance to scrutinize logistics, ticketing, and the artist’s profits. Boldin suggested that in some locales the perception was that Pugacheva could be earning more, which intensified oversight. He added that Pugacheva often carried large sums from international tours, bringing in dollars that, in his view, largely returned to the treasury through state channels.
Reflecting on the broader context, Boldin described a time when a star of Pugacheva’s caliber still faced inherent limits on personal wealth generation. He asserted that the daily revenue for Alla was relatively modest, with a figure around $15 per day cited as her take, while the bulk of proceeds traveled through official conduits. This account provides a lens into how cultural icons navigated the intersections of performance, scrutiny, and state finance in the Soviet era, shaping the public stories that surrounded one of the nation’s most enduring musical legends.