Composer. A popular Soviet creator of romances (Russian art songs) in the post-Revolutionary period. Fomin's soulful melodies are so Russian in character they have been mistaken for folk or gypsy music. His best known tune is "By a Long Road" (c. 1918). It became an international hit 50 years later under the English title "Those Were the Days". Boris Ivanovich Fomin was born in St. Petersburg, and attended the Conservatory there. He settled in Moscow in 1918 and during the Civil War spent a year entertaining Red Army troops in Turkestan. During the 1920s he was active in theatre and produced an operetta, a children's ballet, and several incidental scores, but it was as a songwriter that he made his name. He wrote about 200 songs, and the finest among them - including "Only Time", "Sasha", "Your Green Eyes", "The Guitar, My Friend", and "Last Letter" - were performed by the leading Soviet singers of the day. At the 1929 All-Russia Music Conference the romance genre as a whole was banned as "bourgeois" and Fomin found himself persona non grata overnight. In 1937 he was arrested on trumped-up charges of "slandering Soviet reality", but he was not sent to the gulag and released after a year in prison. Rumor had it that he got off lightly because dictator Josef Stalin was secretly fond of his music. His career was revived during World War II, when the communist government found his talents useful for propaganda purposes. He was named music director of Moscow's Front Theatre, which at the height of the Nazi threat (1942) was the only active playhouse in the capital, and he penned such sentimental ballads as "I Wait", "Silence in the House", and "Letter from the Front". Once the war was over Fomin was again denounced by Stalin's cultural commissars and returned to obscurity. He died of tuberculosis. The history of "By a Long Road"/"Those Were the Days" is one of the most convoluted of any famous pop song. Fomin wrote the original as a teenager, apparently to his own lyrics; the present Russian text (by poet Konstantin Podrevsky) was adapted around 1924. It was introduced by superstar entertainer Alexander Vertinsky, who made the first recording of it in Europe in the 1920s. Other emigre Russian vocalists took it up, often without crediting the composer, and when it was featured in the 1958 Hollywood film "The Brothers Karamazov" (sung by Maria Schell) it was thought of as a 19th Century traditional Russian tune. American folk singer Gene Raskin wrote new English lyrics for the melody and recorded it in 1962 as "Those Were the Days"; that same year it was more successfully covered by the group the Limelighters. Paul McCartney heard Raskin and his wife Francesca perform the song at a London club in 1966 and remembered it when putting together material for his Apple label protege, Welsh singer Mary Hopkin. Released in August 1968, Hopkin's version of "Those Were the Days", produced by McCartney, became a #1 hit in the UK and reached #2 in the US charts. Only Raskin was given a writing credit on the single and to this day the music is popularly attributed to him, McCartney, Kander and Ebb - just about anyone but Fomin, who remains little more than a footnote. As "Those Were the Days" his ditty has been recorded dozens of times in some 10 languages.