Viktor Tsoi

• 1. Introduction

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  Viktor Tsoi died on the 15th of August 1990, at 12:28 in the afternoon, on a highway in Latvia. His dark blue Moskvitch-2141 crossed into oncoming traffic at a speed of at least 100 km/h and collided with an Ikarus 250 bus. The investigation found he had fallen asleep at the wheel, most likely from fatigue. He was 28 years old.

  Two days later, Komsomolskaya Pravda, one of the main Soviet newspapers, published a tribute. It called Tsoi the only rocker with no distance between his image and his real life. It called him the last hero of rock. Thousands of people came to bury him at the Bogoslovskoe Cemetery in Leningrad on the 19th of August.

  Who was Viktor Tsoi? He was a singer-songwriter and actor who co-founded Kino, the band that became arguably the most popular rock group in Soviet history. He was born in Leningrad, the son of a Russian schoolteacher and a Korean engineer whose own parents had been exiled by Stalin. He worked in a boiler room to support his band because the government would not. He played to 62,000 fans at Moscow's Luzhniki Stadium just months before he died.

  How did a young man from a small apartment near Moskovsky Victory Park become a symbol for an entire generation? That is the story this documentary will try to answer.

• 2. Roots and Early Life

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  Viktor Robertovich Tsoi was born on the 21st of June 1962, at a maternity hospital on Kuznetsovskaya Street in Leningrad. His family carried two distinct histories. His mother, Valentina Vasilyevna, was a Russian schoolteacher. His father, Robert Maximovich, was a Korean engineer born in Kyzylorda, Kazakhstan, where his own parents had been sent after Stalin's 1937 deportation of Koreans living in the Soviet Union.

  The Korean ancestry ran deeper still. Viktor's great-grandfather, Choi Yong-nam, was born in 1893 in Kimchaek, in what is now North Korea. The family belonged to the Wonju Choe clan. The surname Choi translates from Korean as "height" or "top." Ethnic Koreans living in the former USSR were known as Koryo-saram, and they typically rendered the family name in the Cyrillic-derived romanization as Tsoi.

  The family lived in a building known locally as the "general's house," at the corner of Moskovsky Avenue and Basseynaya Street. From 1974 to 1977, Viktor attended a secondary art school, where he joined a band called Palata No. 6 - named after Ward No. 6, the Chekhov story. The only surviving recording from that group is an album called "Slonolunie," a portmanteau blending the Russian words for elephant and full moon.

  He enrolled at the Serov Art School in 1977, but was expelled two years later for poor academic performance. He moved on to SGPTU-61, a vocational school where he studied woodcarving. In those years he admired Mikhail Boyarsky and Vladimir Vysotsky; later, Bruce Lee became an influence. He modelled his look after Lee and took up martial arts, often sparring informally with his future bandmate Yuri Kasparyan.

• 3. The Underground and Kino's Birth

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  In the late 1970s, rock music in Leningrad was not on the radio. It was not on state television. It lived in apartments and in one specific venue: the Leningrad Rock Club, one of the few places where bands were permitted to perform. Moscow pop acts endorsed by the Soviet state dominated broadcast media, while rock bands received no funding and almost no public exposure.

  Tsoi began writing songs at 17. One early friend was Alexei Rybin, a member of the hard rock band Piligrimy. The two met at the apartment of Andrei "Svin" Panov, a gathering point for Leningrad's underground musicians, where Panov's own punk band Avtomaticheskie udovletvoriteli rehearsed. Tsoi had begun performing his own songs at parties by this point.

  Tsoi and Rybin traveled to Moscow together to play punk-rock metal at underground concerts organized by Artemy Troitsky. At a similar Leningrad performance, held for Andrei Tropillo's anniversary, they first met Boris Grebenshchikov. After a solo concert by Grebenshchikov, Tsoi played him two songs. Grebenshchikov, already an established presence in the underground scene, was struck by what he heard and helped Tsoi begin forming his own group.

  At the Leningrad Rock Club, Tsoi performed as a solo act with backing from members of Grebenshchikov's band Aquarium. In the summer of 1981, he joined with Rybin and a third musician, Oleg Valinsky, to form a band called Garin i giperboloydy - an homage to the classic Russian novel The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin by Aleksey Tolstoy. The band was admitted to the Leningrad Rock Club that autumn. When Valinsky was drafted into the army, Tsoi and Rybin simplified the name to Kino.

• 4. Albums and the Psychiatric Hospital

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  Kino began recording its debut album in the spring of 1982 at Andrei Tropillo's studio. Members of Aquarium participated in the sessions, with Boris Grebenshchikov directing the record. The album ran 45 minutes and was named accordingly: 45. It circulated through apartment concerts in Moscow and Leningrad.

  On the 19th of February 1983, Kino and Aquarium held a joint concert. Yuri Kasparyan was invited afterward to join Kino as a guitarist. That spring, Rybin left the band following disagreements with Tsoi. Tsoi and Kasparyan spent the summer rehearsing together, producing the album 46, initially conceived as a demo for a future project called Nachalnik Kamchatki. It circulated so widely it was treated as a full release in its own right.

  In the fall of 1983, Tsoi spent a month and a half at a psychiatric hospital in Pryazhka. The stay exempted him from military conscription. After his discharge, he wrote the song "Trankvilizator."

  The song "Peremen!" - also known as "We Are Waiting for Changes" - was first performed by Tsoi in the summer of 1986. It quickly became identified with Perestroika and the political opening it represented. Decades later, it was still in use: the song appeared prominently during the 2020-2021 protests in Belarus, its second life as political anthem fully separated from its original moment.

• 5. Stardom and the Boiler Room

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  Kino's sixth album, Gruppa krovi, was released in 1987 and set off the phenomenon that came to be called "Kinomania." The album's songs addressed Soviet youth directly, urging them to take control and demand change. Other tracks turned toward the social failures accumulating around them. The political climate under Glasnost made the record possible, and the record in turn made Tsoi a hero to a generation.

  Fans in the Soviet Union's diverse republics translated Kino's Russian lyrics into their own languages. The albums circulated through Magnitizdat - the informal network of copied tapes passed hand to hand across the country - free of charge. Kino and Tsoi received no state support. Their music reached millions without the machinery of official distribution.

  Tsoi kept his job in the boiler room of an apartment building nicknamed "Kamchatka." When people expressed surprise, he explained that he liked the work and needed the money to keep the band going. The building is now a museum and rock club in his memory. He also toured Italy, France, and Denmark in 1988-1989, and traveled to the United States to promote his films at festivals.

  The peak of Kino's career arrived in 1990. At Moscow's Luzhniki Stadium, 62,000 fans gathered for a concert that was one of only four occasions when the Luzhniki Olympic Fire was ever lit. It was the last time Tsoi performed in Moscow. Shortly after, he and Kasparyan traveled to Latvia to begin recording the band's next album.

• 6. Film and The Needle

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  In 1987, the band Kino appeared in Assa, a film by Sergei Solovyov. Their appearance was a cameo at the film's end; the film itself had nothing to do with rock music. But the exposure it brought contributed to the explosion of Kinomania.

  The Needle, released in February 1989, gave Tsoi a genuine leading role. The film was directed by Rashid Nugmanov and written by Aleksandr Baranov and Bakhyt Kilibayev. Tsoi played Moro, a man who returns to Almaty, Kazakhstan, to collect a debt. He is detained by an unexpected delay, visits a former girlfriend named Dina, and discovers she is addicted to morphine. He chooses to help her break free and confronts the drug mafia that controls her, led by a figure known as "the doctor." Tsoi was nominated for an award for the performance.

  The film is a Kazakh new wave art film. It uses post-modern storytelling and surreal imagery alongside a soundtrack built from Kino's original music. The combination of Tsoi's laconic screen presence and the band's sound created something distinct from mainstream Soviet cinema.

  In 2018, a second film portrait of Tsoi reached audiences. The film Leto depicted his early years, with Teo Yoo playing Tsoi. That same year, a monument to Tsoi was erected in Almaty, the city that served as the backdrop for The Needle.

• 7. Death and the Black Album

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  Kasparyan had already left for Leningrad before the crash on the 15th of August 1990. He carried with him a tape holding the only recording of Tsoi's vocals for the new album. It was all that existed of the work they had been doing together in Latvia.

  The remaining members of Kino completed the album using that tape. They released it in December 1990. It became known as the Black Album, and it went on to become one of the band's most popular records.

  The death struck fans with force that went beyond grief. Several reportedly took their own lives. On the 17th of August, Komsomolskaya Pravda published its tribute, calling Tsoi someone who never lied and never sold out. The paper said he meant more to young people than any politician, celebrity, or writer in the nation.

  The drummer Georgiy Guryanov died in July 2013. Because of that loss, "Ataman" - a song recorded in 2012 using vocals recovered from recordings made near the time of Tsoi's death - became the final song ever recorded by Kino and its members. The vocals had poor audio quality and had gone unused for over two decades before the band brought them back for what would have been Tsoi's 50th birthday.

• 8. The Wall and What Remained

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  On the 30th anniversary of Tsoi's death, the 15th of August 2020, the Palace Bridge in Saint Petersburg was raised to the sound of his songs. A monument four meters tall had been erected in his memory in Saint Petersburg the day before. Fans gathered at the Tsoi Wall in Moscow - the wall on a bylane off Arbat Street where people have been writing tributes since his death.

  Other Tsoi Walls exist in Minsk, Belarus, and in parts of Kazakhstan. Graffiti bearing his image appears on fences across Russia. In 2000, leading Russian rock bands released a tribute album of their interpretations of Kino's songs, timed to what would have been his 38th birthday.

  His reach extended in unexpected directions. The South Korean band YB covered "Gruppa krovi" on their 1999 album Korean Rock Remade. Viktor An, a South Korean-born short track speed skater who competed for Russia, chose the name Viktor in Tsoi's honor. Polina Gagarina covered Tsoi's song "Kukushka" for the 2015 film Battle for Sevastopol. During a 2019 concert in Moscow, Metallica played a cover of "Gruppa krovi." The video game Cyberpunk 2077, released in 2020, hides graffiti reading "Tsoi lives" in various locations.

  On the 30th of September 2025, the writer William Gibson stated publicly that Tsoi had been a major musical influence on his work. A mountain peak near Almaty carries his name: Viktor Tsoi Peak. The peak in Kazakhstan connects back to The Needle, back to Almaty, back to the film where a quiet young man from Leningrad played a character trying to save someone he cared about from a system that did not care back.