Glazunov was born in Leningrad and his close relatives all died during the German blockade of 1941–4. During the Soviet era he established a career by simultaneously appealing over the heads of the official art world to public taste and painting politically approved subjects, including a portrait of Leonid Brezhnev. From the 1960s onwards he also established an international practice as a portrait painter, his subjects including Federico Fellini and Kurt Waldheim. In 1978, he painted 20th Century Mystery, an allegory in which the sheets on which the dead Stalin lies become a sea of blood, in the centre of a cast who include Hitler, Lenin, and John F. Kennedy, but also Louis Armstrong and Charlie Chaplin.