She was renowned both as an emotional singer with a polished technique and as a charismatic actress. She had performed in operettas and music hall revues before joining the Bolshoi Theater of Russia, the country’s premier opera company.In 1984 she published a memoir, “Galina: A Russian Story,” which recounted the repression, squalor and humiliation endured even by cultural luminaries like herself and her husband under a corrupt political system that claimed to exalt classical music and the opera.