26 October 2022 15:45
People immediately liked it, but officials hated it.
The famous song about “Uchkuduk – three wells”, without exaggeration, was sung by the entire Soviet Union in the 1980s. As ensemble leader Yalla Farrukh Zakirov recalled, the idea for the song came to musicians and poet Yuri Entin quite suddenly, during a tour of Uzbekistan in 1981, and it finally came to life literally in one day.
Uchkuduk is a city whose name is translated from the Uzbek language as “three wells”. For a long time it was closed to the public and classified: already in the 1950s a huge uranium deposit was discovered there, which was extracted by prisoners.
Frightened by the mention of the city, officials eventually banned the song’s performance for more than a year, and only permission from Soviet television chief Sergei Lapin allowed Uchkuduk to air. It was then that the composition turned into a success for the whole Union. And the musicians of “Yalla” are still sure that Uchkuduk appeared on the geographical maps of the Soviet Union only thanks to their main success, which the public still loves today.
