Early years Viktor Robertovich Tsoi was born on 21 June 1962, in a maternity hospital on Kuznetsovskaya Street in
Leningrad. He was the only child of Valentina Vasilyevna Tsoi (), a Russian schoolteacher, and Robert Maximovich Tsoi, a
Soviet Korean engineer from
Kyzyl-Orda, Kazakhstan, where his Korean parents had been exiled after Stalin's 1937
deportation of Koreans in the Soviet Union. The family's Korean ancestry can be traced back to
Kimchaek (Songjin) in the present-day
North Korea, where Viktor's great-grandfather Choi Yong-nam was born in 1893. Tsoi's
Korean clan was the Wonju Choe clan, sometimes spelled as Choi.
Koryo-saram, a term for
ethnic Koreans living in the former
USSR, preferred the surname Tsoi as a romanization of the
cyrillic Цой. Translated from Korean, the surnamed Choi means "height" or "top". Tsoi grew up in the vicinity of the
Moskovsky Victory Park. The family lived in the notable "general's house" at the corner of
Moskovsky Avenue and Basseynaya Street. For some time, Tsoi studied at a nearby school on Frunze Street, where his mother worked. From 1974 until 1977, Tsoi attended a secondary art school, where he was a member of the band Palata No. 6 (, English: "
Ward No. 6"). The only surviving recording of the group is an album titled "Slonolunie" (a
portmanteau of
slon, “elephant”, and
polnolunie, “full moon”). Around the same time, he wrote his first two songs – "Vasya Loves Disco" and "Idiot", though neither were ever performed. From 1977, he attended the
Serov Art School, until he was expelled in 1979 for poor academic performance. Afterwards, he attended SGPTU-61, a
secondary city vocational school, where he studied to become a
woodcarver. In his youth, he was a fan of
Mikhail Boyarsky and
Vladimir Vysotsky, and later
Bruce Lee, after whom he started modelling his image. He was fond of
martial arts and often sparred "in Chinese" with bandmate
Yuri Kasparyan.
First steps in music Tsoi began writing songs at the age of 17. In the 1970s and the 1980s,
rock music was an
underground movement limited mostly to Leningrad.
Moscow pop stars, endorsed by the Soviet state, ruled the charts and received the most exposure from the media. Rock music was not popular with the government, and rock bands received little to no funding and were given little exposure by the media. The
Leningrad Rock Club was one of the few public places where rock bands were allowed to perform. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Tsoi was a close friend of Alexei Rybin. Rybin, a member of the hard rock band Piligrimy (), and Tsoi, who played bass guitar in the group Palata # 6 (), met at the house of Andrei "Svin" Panov, in whose apartment people and musicians often gathered, and also where his own punk band
Avtomaticheskie udovletvoriteli rehearsed. By this time, Tsoi began to perform the songs he wrote at parties. Tsoi and Rybin, as members of Автоматические удовлетворители (Avtomaticheskie udovletvoriteli), went to
Moscow and performed
punk-rock metal at
Artemy Troitsky's underground concerts. During a similar performance in
Leningrad on the occasion of
Andrei Tropillo's anniversary, Tsoi and Rybin first met
Boris Grebenshchikov. Later, after a solo concert by Grebenshchikov, they met up and Tsoi played two of his songs to him. Grebenshchikov, who had already been a relatively established musician in the Leningrad underground scene, was very impressed by Tsoi's talent and helped him start up his own band.
Beginnings of Kino At the Leningrad Rock Club, Tsoi played as a solo artist supported by members of the band
Aquarium. Tsoi's lyrics and music impressed the crowd. In the summer of 1981, Tsoi, Rybin, and Oleg Valinsky formed the band Garin i giperboloydy (). The name was an homage to the classic Russian novel
The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin by
Aleksey Tolstoy. In autumn 1981, the band was admitted to membership of the
Leningrad Rock Club. Not long after, Valinsky was
conscripted into the army, leaving only Tsoi and Rybin, who renamed the band to Kino. Kino began recording its debut album in the spring of 1982.
First albums In the spring of 1982, Kino began recording its debut album
45 at
Andrei Tropillo's studio. Members of Aquarium took part in the recording, with
Boris Grebenshchikov directing the album. By the summer, the album was completely finished. Its duration was 45 minutes, after which the album was named
45. The album got some distribution and Kino performed in many apartment concerts in
Moscow and
Leningrad. On 19 February 1983, a joint concert with Kino and Aquarium took place. After the concert,
Yuri Kasparyan was invited to join the band as a guitarist. In the spring, Rybin left Kino due to disagreements with Tsoi. Tsoi and Kasparyan spent the summer on joint rehearsals. As a result, Kino recorded the album
46, which was initially thought of as a demo for
Nachalnik Kamchatki ().
46 was widely distributed and was considered to be a full-fledged album. In the fall of 1983, Tsoi went to a
psychiatric hospital in
Pryazhka, where he spent a month and a half. As a result, Tsoi was not conscripted into the army. After being discharged from the psychiatric hospital, he wrote the song "Trankvilizator" ().
"Peremen!/"My zhdyom peremen" ("Changes!"/"We are waiting for changes"), first performed by Tsoi in the summer of 1986, quickly became an important political song, an embodiment of the spirit of the
Perestroika. It remains a powerful
political song, prominently used during
2020–2021 Belarusian protests.
Rise to fame 1987 was a breakthrough year for Kino. The release of
their 6th album Gruppa Krovi () triggered what was then called "Kinomania". The open political climate under
Glasnost allowed Tsoi to make
Gruppa Krovi, his most political album, yet it also allowed him to record a sound of music that no one before him had been able to play. Most of the tracks on the album were directed at the youth of the
Soviet Union, telling them to take control and make changes within the nation; some of the songs addressed the social problems crippling the nation. The sound and lyrics of the album made Tsoi a hero among
Soviet youth and Kino the most popular rock band in the Soviet Union. In the diverse Soviet republics, fans translated his originally
Russian lyrics into their native languages as well. Over the next few years, Tsoi appeared in several successful movies and also travelled to the
United States to promote his films at
film festivals. Several more albums were released, their themes were once again mostly political, further fueling the band's popularity. Even though Tsoi was a huge star, he still lived a relatively ordinary life. He kept his old job in the
boiler room of an apartment building, called Kamchatka, which is currently a museum/club dedicated to the singer. The fact that he worked at a boiler plant surprised many people. Tsoi said that he enjoyed the work and he also needed the money to support the band, as they still received no government support and their albums were copied and passed around the nation via
Magnitizdat free of charge. This made Tsoi even more popular among the people because it showed that he was down to earth and they could relate to him. He also went on tour in 1988–1989 to
Italy,
France, and
Denmark. Kino's finest hour came in 1990 with a concert at
Moscow's Luzhniki Stadium; 62,000 fans filled the stands to celebrate the triumph of the USSR's most successful rock group. It also was one of the four times the
Luzhniki Olympic Fire was ever lit.
Film appearances In 1987, the band Kino, along with other
Russian rock bands, appeared as themselves in
Assa (), a film by
Sergei Solovyov. However, the film as a whole has nothing to do with rock music, and Kino simply appears as a cameo in the end. In 1988, Viktor Tsoi starred as the protagonist in
The Needle (), directed by
Rashid Nugmanov and written by Aleksandr Baranov and Bakhyt Kilibayev. The plot is centered around the character Moro, who returns to
Almaty, Kazakhstan, to collect money owed to him. While waiting out an unexpected delay, he visits his former girlfriend Dina and discovers she has become a
morphine addict. He decides to help her quit and fight the local drug mafia responsible for her condition. But Moro finds a deadly opponent in "the doctor," the
mafia kingpin who is exploiting Dina. Tsoi was nominated for an award for his role in the film. The film's soundtrack, including original music by Tsoi's band Kino, contributes to the overall feeling of the movie, in addition to the film's use of post-modern twists and surreal scenes. The movie was officially released in February 1989 in the Soviet Union. ==Death==