Natasha Shneider

Shneider was born in Riga, Latvia (then Soviet Union), to a Jewish family. She proved musically gifted from an early age and both of her parents were musicians.\n', '

In the early 1970s she was a member of \'Sovremennik\', a state-run pop orchestra, that featured Natasha Shneider on vocals and piano, her first husband Serge Kapustin on guitar and percussion. Her brother Vladimir Shneider produced and played piano and keyboards for the \'Singing Hearts\', which was one of Russia\'s hottest groups in the mid-\'70s, whose output and sound was heavily controlled by the Soviet authorities. Vladimir Shneider recalled: "We\'d sing 37 songs about how good the Communist Party is, and at the end—if we were lucky — we were allowed to play a mellow song like Killing Me Softly or Ain\'t No Sunshine. But never rock."\n', '

In May 1976, Natasha Shneider, her husband Kapustin, and her brother Vladimi…