Before Mikhail Gulko recorded the songs that made him a defining voice of Russian chanson, he spent more than a decade working as a mining engineer while playing weddings and city celebrations. Gulko, the Kharkiv-born singer, songwriter and accordionist whose records carried urban romance into Russian-speaking communities far beyond the Soviet Union, died in New York on August 11, 2026, InterMedia reported. He was 95.

Gulko was born on July 23, 1931, in Kharkiv. His mother performed and played piano, his father worked as a bookseller's accountant, and the family's records introduced him to singers such as Pyotr Leshchenko. After wartime evacuation to Chelyabinsk, he returned to a city and a childhood in which the accordion became his instrument. By his last school years, he was already playing for dances.

His parents steered him toward technical study, and Gulko worked for more than 12 years as a mining engineer in Ukraine. Music ran alongside that profession. Radio Chanson recounts that in the early 1960s he led a five-member ensemble on Kamchatka, performing in the port restaurant Okean and aboard ships for sailors. In Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, he also completed choral conducting studies at a music school. By 1969 he had moved to Moscow and was leading restaurant ensembles there.

By 1980 Gulko was in New York, where reinvention began without glamour. He completed computer college and, as he later told Information Portal Chanson, rode a bicycle from restaurant to restaurant looking for work as a singer, accordionist or keyboard player. The first engagement came at a restaurant called Fiddler on the Roof. Within a few years, the immigrant musician had turned the songs he carried with him into records.

Blue Sky of Russia, released in the early 1980s, gathered songs including "White Birch," "Kolyma," "Poruchik Golitsyn" and "Echelon." Burned Bridges followed in 1984 with "Gospoda Ofitsery," "Farewell to the Motherland" and "Okurochek." In 1985 he issued Songs of the War Years, dedicating it to the 40th anniversary of victory in the Second World War. His voice and accordion carried this repertoire through restaurant performances, concert halls and recordings.

The career eventually ran in both directions across the Atlantic. Radio Chanson dates his first post-emigration Moscow concert visit to 1992, when he appeared at the Estrada Theatre. The album Abroad arrived in 1996, and his catalog continued well into the new century. Apple Music lists Na Materik in 2008 and the two-volume Unsung Songs in 2014 and 2015. A 2016 benefit at Master Theater in Brighton Beach placed him again before a New York audience.

Gulko also preserved his story in the 2009 memoir The Fate of an Emigrant. Music historian Maksim Kravchinsky, who helped bring the book into print and knew him for more than 35 years, wrote shortly before Gulko's death that the singer had been his teacher and guide to Russian diaspora culture. That description captured a role larger than a recording career: Gulko connected later listeners and researchers to the singers, romances and performance traditions he had absorbed as a boy.

The concrete record of that pursuit remains in Blue Sky of Russia and Burned Bridges, in the wartime-song collection, in Abroad and the late Unsung Songs volumes. It also remains in the familiar titles "Kolyma," "Poruchik Golitsyn" and "Gospoda Ofitsery," recordings that still carry Gulko's voice and accordion between Kharkiv, Moscow, Brighton Beach and Russian-speaking homes far beyond them.