Leshchenko would dress up in a tuxedo, with a white silk handkerchief and sing and dance Argentine tango. In the Soviet Union his work was banned both because he was believed to be a White émigré (which he was not legally) and because the style (tango and foxtrot) was deemed counter-revolutionary. Nevertheless, secretly he was very popular: people would even listen to Radio Tehran to hear his music, '78 records were smuggled into the country from the Baltics, and specialists would bootleg his music onto "ribs" (used X-ray plates). When during the Second World War and the subsequent occupation of Odessa by the Romanian army, Leshchenko was finally able to perform in the country he still considered his own, people would queue for hours on end to buy a ticket to one of his Odessa concerts. It was at Odessa that Pyotr met his second wife, Vera Georgievna Belousova, for whom he would later, back in Romania, divorce Zinaida. After Romania switched sides in August 1944 and the Soviet army entered Romania, Leshchenko was not arrested, and became the protégé of general Vladimir Ivanovich Burenin, military commander of the Red Army garrison in Bucharest. Some sources believe this was due to Marshal Georgy Zhukov being a secret admirer of his music – Pyotr probably thought so, and after the war, wrote many letters to friends in the Soviet Union asking them to contact high-level officials so that he and Vera might be allowed back to the country of their birth. In 1951, a week after receiving an official letter granting them permission to settle in the Soviet Union, Vera and Pyotr were arrested by the Romanian police. Vera was extradited to the Soviet Union, where she was condemned to forced labour for amongst other things, "marrying a foreigner". Pyotr was detained in a prison near Bucharest, and then was sent to a forced labor camp at the Danube–Black Sea Canal. Both outlived Joseph Stalin, but Pyotr died in a prison hospital in Târgu Ocna on 16 July 1954, without Vera at his side (she had already been released but did not know her husband was still alive). Some friends present when he died claimed his last words were "Friends, I am happy, for I will return to my fatherland! I am going away, but I leave you my heart." Vera died on December 18, 2009, age 86. In 1988, his