Facts from the biography of Leonid Bronevoy, which were not told in the USSR

What was hidden behind the wise irony and ironic wisdom of an outstanding artist

In 1973, the whole country tightly stuck to TV and watched the serial film “Seventeen Moments of Spring”. This in itself is not a miracle – we have always loved films about Leonid Armor intelligence officers.

At that time, Leonid Sergeevich did not have, unlike Vyacheslav Tikhonov, all-Union fame, and he was not at all handsome (they said: “the face is not positive”), but his talent and charisma made a true miracle. Few people knew then that the fear of being exposed, arrests, interrogations for Leonid Bronevoy are not the signs of a script, but the pages of his own biography that he underwent.

Because it is armored

Leonid was the son of Solomon Faktorovich and Bella Landau. The boy was born on December 17, 1928 in Kiev, when his parents were studying at the university at the workers’ faculty. Bella really wanted her husband to go the way of a lawyer, but Solomon, with the assistance of his brother, ended up in the economic department of the GPU. It wasn’t long before Leni was born.

Then Bella Lvovna, as Bronevoy later said, cried all her tears. She seemed to have a premonition of what a tragedy this “occupation” would be for her whole family. But the Faktorovich brothers didn’t care at that time. In Civil, during the riots in Odessa, one of them, Abram, went with his chest to the White Guard armored car. The hero died, but his brothers with admiration began to be called “armored” or “armored”. Subsequently, the nickname turned into a surname.

And Armored’s early career lived up to the nickname. Alexander took a leading position in the Ukrainian GPU, helped Solomon in the work.

No trial or investigation

Leni Bronevoy’s first years were very prosperous, the family had a wonderful apartment in the city center. The boy grew up talented, he learned to play the violin from the famous musician David Berthier. Childhood ended when the boy was eight years old. My father was arrested, they recalled that once at a meeting in the 1920s Solomon spoke out in support of Trotsky.

Speaking of which: In San Diego, while on tour with an actor, an incident occurred that shook him for the rest of his life. In a meeting with the public, he was approached by a man who had once been questioned by Solomon Faktorovich. The actor’s father, as an investigator for economic affairs, “hauled out” the money of the NEP men. During that trip, Bronevoi also learned that her aunt had emigrated to the United States after the revolution and she had become a millionaire there.

The entire brilliant career of the Armored brothers ended in an instant. The actor’s uncle was destroyed without trial or investigation in his own office. The father was sentenced to ten years. Bella Lvovna was forced to divorce her husband. It was then that her son became, according to the documents, Leonid Sergeevich Bronev.

Son of an enemy of the people

But at first, this did not save the disgraced family. They were sent to the Kirov region and only on the eve of the war were they allowed to return to Kiev again. However, the next evacuation to Chimkent followed, and for many years the life of Leonid Bronevoy was associated with Central Asia.

Speaking of which: Experienced by Armor in his childhood left a deep imprint on his soul. He flatly refused to join the party, even when it was hinted to him that without this he would not have become a People’s Artist of the USSR. I did not understand those who tried to defend the Stalinist regime. And he was indignant at his attitude towards the people of the Central Asian republics. He always remembered the good he saw in the evacuation.

In Chimkent, Leonid graduated from high school and began to earn extra money in all possible ways. He was a baker’s apprentice, a “typist” secretary. But he was attracted to art. His creative career began with the fact that he worked in the sewing shop of the puppet theater. And only in 1950, at the age of 22, Armor entered the Tashkent Theater and Art Institute.

With the stigma “son of an enemy of the people” it was difficult to count on a bright future. And even after the exposure of the personality cult, fate shook the actor for a long time around the province, despite the fact that he graduated from the Moscow Art Theater School as an external student. They assigned it to Grozny. He went there together with his wife Valentina Blinova, who graduated from the Shchukin School. In honor of his wife, the young couple named their daughter. A family of artists from Grozny moved to Irkutsk and then settled in Voronezh.

Life has paid off

When the daughter was only four years old, his wife died of cancer. Driven by desperation, Bronevoy went to Moscow, where his wife had relatives. He himself hadn’t lived with his mother for a long time, and with his father, who managed to come back alive after prisons and settlements and even get his rewards back, he rarely spoke.

At first, Leonid was not taken anywhere in Moscow. It’s hard to imagine that Armor made a living and his daughter by playing dominoes. But in the end, luck smiled: he was taken to the theater on Malaya Bronnaya. At first it was difficult to call it work for the soul. But then in 1967 Anatoly Efros came to the theater. And life seemed to begin to repay Leonid Sergeevich for all the suffering that he endured. Theatrical Moscow began to get acquainted with him.

And then “Seventeen Moments of Spring” broke out, where, unexpectedly, the audience saw the unusual Gestapo Muller. He who knows who Leonid Sergeevich was thinking about, endowing this beast with unexpected lyrical colors …

Speaking of which: On the first day of filming “Seventeen Moments …” the actor signed with his second wife, Victoria. They say that KGB Chairman Andropov personally approved the role of Muller Bronevoy. And, uttering the actor’s name, Yuri Vladimirovich suddenly remembered that for some time in his youth he lived in Kiev in the apartment of “some armored personnel carriers”, who fed and watered a poor student. It turned out that he was Leonid Sergeevich’s uncle.

In 1988, Leonid Sergeevich moved to Lenkom, which gave the actor a second theatrical breath. His last role was Prince Sobakin, which he played in 2016.

The roles of Armored in the cinema have long been scattered in quotes. And even in the most ridiculous of them, the pain and wisdom of the outstanding Russian actor Leonid Sergeevich Bronevoy remained.