Rimma Fyodorovna Kazakova (27 January 1932, Sevastopol, Crimean ASSR - 19 May 2008, Yudino, Moscow Oblast) was a Soviet and Russian poetess, translator, and author of many popular songs of the Soviet period and the 1990s.
Her father, Fyodor Lazarevich Kazakov (1899-1967), was a military officer, and her mother, Sofia Alexandrovna Shulman (1905-1987), worked as a secretary-machinist. The name given by her parents means "Revolution, Electrification, World October". At the age of 20 she took the name Rimma.
Kazakova spent her early childhood in Belarus, her school years - in Leningrad. With the beginning of the Great Patriotic War she was evacuated to the city of Glazov, Udmurt ASSR, where the 2nd Leningrad Infantry School, where her mother worked, was evacuated. Her father was a participant of the Great Patriotic War, awarded orders and medals, colonel.
She graduated from the Faculty of History of the Leningrad State University. For seven years she lived in the Far East in Khabarovsk. Worked as a lecturer, teacher, in the newspaper, at the film studio.
The first poems of Kazakova, who belonged to the generation of sixties along with Yevtushenko, Okudzhava, Voznesensky, Akhmadulina, Rozhdestvensky, Kashezheva, were published in 1955, and in 1958 the first collection of her poems "Let's meet in the East" was published. In 1959 Kazakova was admitted to the Union of Writers of the USSR.
In 1962 she took part in filming the episode "Evenings of Poets" in Marlen Khutsiev's film "Zastava Ilyicha". In 1964 she graduated from the higher literary courses at the Writers' Union.
One of the compilers of Viktor Yerofeev's uncensored literary almanac Metropol claimed in 1990 in the magazine Ogonyok that Kazakova took part in the harassment of the almanac and its participants, claiming that their writings were "rubbish, not literature, something close to graphomania". Kazakova herself denied the accusations in her response article "Memories with repentance and clarification" in The Book Review.
Rimma Kazakova is the author of numerous collections of poetry, was also engaged in translations from the languages of near and far abroad countries. Rimma Kazakova is known as the author of poems for such popular songs as "You Love Me" (composer - Igor Krutoy, performer - Alexander Serov), "Madonna" (composer - I. Krutoy, performer - Alexander Serov), "My Lovely One" (composer - Alexandra Pakhmutova, performer - Maya Kristalinskaya) and others.
She died on 19 May 2008 at the age of 76 in a sanatorium in the village of Yudino. The cause of death was acute heart failure. She was buried on 22 May 2008 at the Vagankovskoye cemetery in Moscow.
