Seva Kaplan: What Remains When Success Is Gone?

The Russian-Language Radio Legend On Freedom, Family, Friendship, Jewish Identity, And What We Leave Behind

 

Roman Kaykov began his conversation with Seva Kaplan with a premise: Every person has two biographies. One contains the titles, accomplishments, reputation, and public persona that others know. The second is known only by those closest to us. What remains, Roman asked, when the titles and accomplishments disappear?

It was a fitting question for Kaplan, a longtime figure in Russian-language broadcasting in America, an immigrant from the Soviet Union, and founder of the Russian-language radio station Narodnaya Volna. Over more than an hour in the Kaykov TV studio, however, Kaplan spoke less about his résumé than about the experiences that changed him. He told Roman that he still discovers himself as circumstances change. Betrayal, losing money, losing friends, or encountering something unexpected becomes another mirror. “Every time, for me, it is a new mirror in which I see that my reflection changes,” he said. “If that hasn’t happened, it means I’ve stopped developing.”

Kaplan grew up in Moscow in a musical family. Both parents were conservatory-trained pianists, and his father, Arnold Kaplan, was an accomplished concert pianist. They hoped Seva would follow the same path. He had perfect pitch but wanted little to do with the discipline of music school and deliberately undermined his audition; his younger brother became the pianist instead. Yet what Kaplan remembers most about his parents has little to do with music. “My mother and father never spoke badly about anyone,” he told Roman. “My mother and father never praised themselves.” He considers those among the most important lessons they gave him. His childhood also produced one of the interview’s more improbable stories. Kaplan recalled being three years old and walking with his father near the Moscow residence of Lavrentiy Beria, one of the Soviet Union’s most feared officials. Young Seva was amusing himself by throwing stones at targets and tossed one toward a light just as guards emerged. His father was seized before it became clear who had actually thrown it. According to Kaplan’s recollection, Beria appeared, learned that the culprit was the three-year-old, patted him on the head, and called him brave. Decades later, Kaplan could laugh about the encounter. His eventual decision to leave the Soviet Union was far more consequential.

When Kaplan arrived in America in 1988, he had no clear idea what his new life would look like. He repaired televisions at a hotel and imagined perhaps opening a small repair shop. Then an acquaintance connected to Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe offered him an opportunity in broadcasting with a simple condition: Learn the work within six months or lose the job. Kaplan knew almost nothing about radio, but took the chance. He learned engineering, editing, production, and broadcasting, eventually working with prominent writers and voices in the Russian-speaking world. When the New York operation closed, Kaplan had a recently purchased house and no dependable career. He delivered sandwiches and took grueling simultaneous-translation work before another radio opportunity appeared. He competed against other prospective hosts, won the position, and began building an audience. By 1997, Kaplan was ready to launch his own operation. He recalled beginning with expensive airtime and no advertising, then working punishing hours as the audience and business grew. He wrote advertisements, produced programming, managed operations, and said that at the height of that period he sometimes slept only about two hours a night.

Years later, when Roman asked what success means to him, Kaplan did not mention audience size, money, recognition, or professional accomplishments. “It’s when you fall asleep quickly.” To Kaplan, being able to sleep means there is nothing from the day weighing heavily enough on his conscience to keep him awake. Perhaps he cried at one point and laughed at another, but he lived the day fully without doing something he deeply regrets. His understanding of money is similarly practical. Kaplan described the simple pleasure of leaving a grocery store having purchased what he needed without worrying about every price. Money, he said, is a tool rather than an end in itself. There is enough when there is enough to accomplish the goal one has set. Kaplan believes greater wealth and fame might actually have cost him something more valuable. Looking back at the media business he once built, he told Roman that under different circumstances he might have become substantially richer and more famous. He is not convinced he would have liked the person he became.

His willingness to resist being absorbed into a crowd extends to politics. Kaplan told Roman that he views President Donald Trump as a form of “shock therapy” for an American democracy he believes had become stagnant, and praised Trump’s abilities as a showman. But Kaplan also insisted that admiration cannot place a political figure beyond criticism. Otherwise, he argued, journalism becomes propaganda. Kaplan said that position cost him several people he had considered friends because they could not accept criticism of Trump. His experience led naturally to a saying he prefers about friendship. Russians traditionally say that a friend is known in adversity. Kaplan favors a Georgian version: “A friend is known in joy.” Someone who can genuinely celebrate another person’s happiness, he believes, reveals something important about the friendship. Kaplan generally chooses to trust people. If that trust proves misplaced, he tries to regard the experience as a lesson for which he paid a price. Even losing a substantial amount of money, he said, can turn out to be relatively inexpensive if the experience teaches something important about another person or oneself.

One of his most extraordinary examples involved Boris “Biba” Nayfeld, a notorious figure in New York’s Russian-speaking underworld. Kaplan told Roman that during the height of his radio career, Nayfeld had allegedly been assigned to kill him. According to Kaplan, the attempt never materialized. Years later, the two met and became friendly. When Roman moved the conversation toward family, Kaplan offered a striking observation about the community sitting on the other side of the microphone. He told Roman that he admires the Bukharian Jewish community because, in his view, it remains a community in the fullest sense: family, extended family, self-respect, culture, heritage, and a desire to remember those who came before. Bukharian Jews survived under difficult conditions in Central Asia, Kaplan observed, and developed lessons in continuity from which others can learn. He contrasted that with his own childhood, where much of the family story remained unspoken. His parents would whisper to one another while he knew little about the history behind those conversations.

Kaplan’s own Jewish identity has an unusual family history. His father was Jewish and his mother was ethnically Russian. Yet Kaplan recalled that when someone asked his mother her nationality, she would answer, “I am Jewish.” When he asked why, she told him that Jews had suffered so much that she wanted to stand with them. Roman’s question about what a community must transmit to its children brought Kaplan to October 7, 2023. He was in Israel when the Hamas attack occurred and traveled through the country speaking with Israelis as people were struggling to understand how such a catastrophe could have happened. For Kaplan, being part of a people does not mean believing that its institutions or leaders are incapable of failure. His loyalty to Israel does not prevent him from asking difficult questions about what went wrong.

He is also troubled by what younger generations may be losing in ordinary human interaction. Kaplan believes dependence on social media and abbreviated communication is weakening the ability to converse, think sequentially, and remain intellectually engaged. What particularly bothers him is seeing a person stop developing and lose curiosity. “An intellect that hasn’t died demands food,” he said. Kaplan is less optimistic about the traditional American dream than the immigrant who arrived here in 1988. Homeownership, he argued, has become prohibitively expensive for many younger Americans, while higher education can impose enormous costs without guaranteeing economic security. Rapid technological change is also transforming professions that once appeared stable. Asked what a young person should pursue — education, connections, character, or courage — Kaplan rejected a universal formula. A person’s future, he said, is more like a custom-made suit than something purchased off the rack. Talents, personality, weaknesses, education, and circumstances differ too much for one prescription to fit everyone.

For all that America gave Kaplan, one of his deepest regrets involves bringing his parents here. When he left the Soviet Union, emigration appeared permanent. His parents followed several months later. In Moscow, they had lived near the conservatory and belonged to a rich social world filled with fellow musicians and longtime friends. In America, they never complained. They found ways to teach and continue with music, but Kaplan sensed that something had been lost. “I uprooted the roots of people who were no longer young,” he told Roman. He also knows that had he understood the consequences at the time, his parents probably would not have allowed him to leave them behind. There was no simple correct choice, only one whose cost became clearer with age.

His father died at 76, his mother at 81, and Kaplan still carries his father’s music with him. He recalled his father performing the extraordinarily demanding piano transcription of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. After one performance, his father sat exhausted backstage when the renowned pianist Yakov Flier came in. According to Kaplan, Flier told him that he had left a bucket of blood on the stage and asked whether anyone had understood what the performance had required. Kaplan’s response to the story, years later, was simple: Flier understood. That alone was not insignificant. As Kaplan grows older, recordings of his father’s performances have taken on new meaning. He hears more than notes in them now. He hears what he described as the movement of his father’s soul.

His own son eventually asked him to do something similar: “Dad, record all the Russian romances you know.” Kaplan had sung them for years, and his son wanted them preserved in his father’s own voice. Kaplan recorded the songs, recognizing only afterward what the request meant to him because he possessed the same kind of inheritance from his own father. Just days before the Kaykov TV interview, his son called again. Kaplan had recently become a grandfather, and his granddaughter, Misha, was only four days old when her father played Seva’s recordings for her. “Now that is legacy, Roman,” Kaplan said. It is especially striking because Kaplan resists the conventional idea of leaving descendants a blueprint for how to live. When Roman asked what he wanted to leave behind, Kaplan initially answered, “I would like nothing to remain.” Future generations, he explained, should be able to begin with a clean sheet rather than build their lives from the assumptions of people who inhabited another time. The architects of the future will be different, and Kaplan does not want himself turned into one of the bricks that dictates the shape of their building.

Yet his own family has found another kind of inheritance. Kaplan did not instruct his son to preserve his songs; his son asked for them. Just as Kaplan returned to his father’s recordings and discovered more in them as he grew older, his son decided that his father’s voice was something worth carrying forward. Now that voice has already reached another generation. Near the end of the interview, Roman asked Kaplan to imagine meeting his younger self with only a minute to offer advice. Kaplan had four instructions: Learn foreign languages. Study music. Play sports. Learn how to defend yourself. “Four things,” he said. “You’ll be fine.” For someone who once deliberately sabotaged his music-school audition, the second item alone says something about what a lifetime can teach.

Roman began the interview by asking about the biography hidden behind the public one. Kaplan’s answer ultimately came not through the famous names he encountered, the radio audience he built, the money he earned, or the risks he took. It came through the people whose voices remain with us — and the people who decide, without being told, that those voices are worth preserving.

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DAVID MAVASHEV is a mathematician, technology entrepreneur, and founder of Nastel Technologies. Born in Dushanbe, he studied mathematics in the Soviet Union before immigrating to Israel, where he worked, taught, continued his studies, and served in the Israeli military. He later moved to the United States and built a career in software and technology. His interests also include Jewish thought, Bukharian history and culture, Shashmaqam, and preserving family and communal history.

ROMAN KAYKOV is president of Kaykov Media and host and senior producer of KAYKOV TV. Through Kaykov TV, Roman sits down with rabbis, educators, business leaders, artists, and community figures for conversations about Jewish life, Bukharian identity, family, culture, faith, business, and community.