Viktor Robertovich Tsoi (Russian: Виктор Робертович Цой, IPA: [ˈvʲiktər ˈrobʲɪrtəvʲɪtɕ ˈtsoj]; 21 June 1962 – 15 August 1990) was a Soviet singer-songwriter and actor who co-founded Kino, one of the most popular and influential bands in the history of Russian music.
Born and raised in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) to a Russian mother and Koryo-saram father, Tsoi started writing songs as a teenager. Throughout his career, Tsoi contributed a plethora of musical and artistic works, including ten albums. After Kino appeared and performed in the 1987 Soviet film Assa, the band's popularity surged, triggering a period referred to as "Kinomania", and leading to Tsoi's leading role in the 1988 Kazakh new wave art film The Needle. In 1990, after a high-profile concert at Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium, Tsoi briefly relocated to Latvia with bandmate Yuri Kasparyan to work on the band's next album. Two months after the concert, Tsoi died in a traffic collision.
Tsoi was one of the most important pioneers of rock music in Russia and is credited with popularizing the genre throughout the Soviet Union. Becoming popular by combining his music and lyrics with philosophy, he retains a devoted following throughout the former Soviet Union, where he is known as one of the most influential and popular people in the history of Russian music.
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 (née Guseva), a Russian schoolteacher, and Robert Maximovich Tsoi, a Soviet Korean engineer from Kyzylorda, 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, ethnic Koreans living in the former USSR, preferred the surname Tsoi as a romanization of the cyrillic Цой. Translated from Korean, the surname 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 (Russian: Палата № 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.
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 (Russian: Пилигримы, lit. 'Pilgrims'), and Tsoi, who played bass guitar in the group Palata # 6 (Russian: Палата № 6, lit. 'Ward No. 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.
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 (Russian: Гарин и Гиперболоиды, lit. 'Garin and the hyperboloids'). 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.
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 (Russian: Начальник Камчатки, lit. 'Chief of Kamchatka'). 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" (Russian: Транквилизатор, lit. 'Tranquilizer').
"Peremen!" ("Changes"), first performed by Tsoi in the summer of 1986, became heavily associated with the social shifts of the Perestroika era and later saw use in various post-Soviet political movements, such as the 2020–2021 Belarusian protests.
Despite the song later becoming a staple of political demonstrations, its politicization took place against the wishes of Viktor Tsoi, who insisted that the track was not a protest song.
1987 marked a major turning point for Kino with the release of their 6th album Gruppa krovi (Russian: Группа крови, lit. 'Blood Type'), which sparked widespread public devotion known as "Kinomania." Benefiting from the cultural shifts of Glasnost, the album allowed the band to record with a polished, spacious production style and sophisticated sound that set a new standard for Soviet rock.
The album's atmospheric soundscapes and distinct lyrical themes resonated deeply with youth across the Soviet Union, propelling Kino to mainstream prominence. Songs from the record were widely shared, and fans across the diverse Soviet republics translated the originally Russian lyrics into their native languages as the band's cultural reach expanded nationwide.