Mikhail Isaevich Tankhilevich was born in
Taganrog in a
Jewish family. He graduated from the Rostov Civil Engineering College (
Rostov-on-Don,
Russia). He was in the Army during
World War II, participated at the
Battle of Berlin and was awarded with an
Order of Glory of 3rd degree. After the end of the war, he entered the Rostov Engineering and Construction Institute, from which he did not manage to graduate. In 1947, he was arrested on the grounds of false accusations, and spent time in prison until 1953. Many years later, he confessed in a TV interview, ‘I served 6 years in one of the most horrible Stalinist camps for some nonsense, for a joke, a word.’ After his release, he lived on Sakhalin and worked as a foreman at Stroymekhmontazh. Not being rehabilitated, he could not settle in Moscow, although his cousin lived there. At the age of thirty-three, he married eighteen-year-old Lydia Kozlova. In 1956 Tanich was rehabilitated. The couple moved to Orekhovo-Zuyevo, and after a while - to Zheleznodorozhnyi. His first book of collected poems was published in 1959. He then went on to write a total of fifteen books. In the beginning of the 1960s he wrote a song
The Textile Town, written in collaboration with the Soviet composer
Yan Frenkel, became a hit. It was sung by a number of popular singers including
Raisa Nemetova and
Maya Kristalinskaya. Together with
Yury Saulsky, the poet wrote the schlager ‘Black Cat’. Tanich also called the patriotic song ‘Confession of Love’, written together with
Serafim Tulikov, one of his favourite songs. He has also co-authored with many Soviet composers such as
Yuri Saulsky,
Arkady Ostrovsky,
Vadim Gamaliya,
Oscar Feltsman,
Nikita Bogoslovsky,
Vladimir Shainsky. Other composers Tanich has worked with include
Igor Nikolayev,
Arkady Ukupnik and
Vyacheslav Malezhik. In the mid-1980s Tanich began composing poems for the most popular composers of the time -
David Tukhmanov and
Raimond Pauls. In 1991, he wrote the lyrics to
Alexander Malinin's song ‘New Star’. Tanich collaborated with
Alyona Apina, whom the poet considered ‘his singer’, as well as
Larisa Dolina. He continued his long-standing collaboration with
Edita Piekha. Along with
Sergey Korzhukov who died in 1994, Mikhail Tanich cofounded the group
Lesopoval. == Death ==