In the early 1970s, Shneider was a member of 'Sovremennik', a state-run pop orchestra, that featured her on vocals and piano, as well as her first husband Serge Kapustin on guitar and percussion. Her brother Vladimir Shneider produced and played piano and keyboards for the 'Singing Hearts', which was one of Russia's hottest groups in the mid-1970s, whose output and sound were heavily controlled by the Soviet authorities. Vladimir Shneider recalled: "We'd sing 37 songs about how good the Communist Party is, and at the end—if we were lucky — we were allowed to play a mellow song like Killing Me Softly or Ain't No Sunshine. But never rock."