Виктория Муллова

Viktoria Yurievna Mullova (born 27 November 1959) is a Russian violinist. She is best known for her performances and recordings of a number of violin concerti, compositions by J.S. Bach, and her innovative interpretations of popular and jazz compositions by Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, the Beatles, and others. Mullova was born in Zhukovsky, near Moscow, in Soviet Russia. After studying at the Central Music School of Moscow and at the Moscow Conservatoire under Leonid Kogan, she won first prize at the 1980 International Jean Sibelius Violin Competition in Helsinki and the Gold Medal at the International Tchaikovsky Competition in 1982. During a tour of Finland in 1983, Mullova and her lover, Vakhtang Jordania, who posed as her accompanist so they could defect together, left the hotel in Kuusamo, after Jordania told the KGB officer who was watching them that Mullova was too sick from drinking to attend the afterparty. The Stradivari violin owned by the Soviet Union was left behind on the hotel bed. A YLE journalist Jyrki Koulumies, accompanied by a photographer Caj Sundman, drove them in a rented car across the border via Haaparanta to Luleå, Sweden where they flew to Stockholm.

At that time, the Swedish police treated the young, on-the-run musicians just like any other political defectors from the Eastern Bloc: they suggested that the couple stay in a safehouse over the weekend until the American Embassy opened so they could apply for political asylum upon relocation. So for two days they sat under pseudonyms in a safehouse not even daring to go outside, because their photographs were on the front page of every Swedish and international newspaper. Two days later they arrived in Washington, D.C. with American visas in their pockets.