Viktor Tsoi — musician with roots in the USSR
He was born in a maternity hospital on Kuznetsovskaya Street in Leningrad in June 1962, the only child of Valentina Guseva, a Russian schoolteacher, and Robert Tsoi, an engineer.
His father was Koryo-saram - a Soviet Korean - and was born at Kyzyl-Orda in Kazakhstan, because that is where his own parents had been sent. In 1937 the Korean population of the Soviet Far East, some 170,000 people, was deported to Central Asia. The family line runs back to Songjin in Hamgyong province, now Kimchaek in North Korea, where Viktor's great-grandfather Choi Yong-nam was born in 1893; the clan name Choe or Choi became Tsoi in Russian transliteration, and Koryo-saram families generally kept that spelling.
He was expelled from art school at fifteen and began writing songs at seventeen. In 1982 he formed Kino, which released its first album that year. An early song about a man stuck on a commuter train heading the wrong way was read as being about something larger and was banned. In 1983 he spent six weeks in the Pryazhka psychiatric hospital in Leningrad, which had the effect of exempting him from military service. For years he worked as a stoker in a boiler room called Kamchatka - now a museum and club - and the band's records circulated largely as magnitizdat, home-copied tapes passed hand to hand.
The songs were short, plain and unadorned, closer to post-punk than to the bardic tradition, and they were written in a register that sounded like ordinary speech. Peremen, first performed in 1986 - the title means changes, and the refrain says that is what we are waiting for - became the defining song of the late Soviet years, though Tsoi consistently declined to explain it politically.
Kino appeared in Sergei Solovyov's film Assa in 1987 and the effect was immediate; the press called what followed Kinomania. In 1988 he took the lead in Rashid Nugmanov's The Needle, a landmark of the Kazakh new wave. In June 1990 the band played to sixty-two thousand people at the Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow, the largest concert a Soviet rock group had given.
Two months later, working in Latvia on the next album, he fell asleep at the wheel on the Sloka-Talsi road and was killed instantly. He was twenty-eight. His guitarist Yuri Kasparyan had already returned to Leningrad with a tape of his vocals; the surviving members finished the record around them and released it in December as the Black Album. It was the band's most successful.
He is buried in Leningrad. Walls of remembrance exist in several cities, and his standing in the Russian-speaking world has not diminished in thirty-five years. In 2014 a Russian parliamentarian claimed the songs had been written by the CIA, and Tsoi's son took him to court over it.
"Father's family deported from the Soviet Far East to Kazakhstan, 1937"
Migration storyTracing the roots — Leningrad (Russia)
Co-founder and songwriter of Kino, the most influential rock band of the late Soviet period. Kino's records circulated largely as magnitizdat home-copied tapes before the band reached a mass audience through the 1987 film Assa.
Born in Leningrad to a Russian schoolteacher and a Koryo-saram engineer. His father was born at Kyzyl-Orda in Kazakhstan, where his parents had been sent in the 1937 deportation of the Korean population of the Soviet Far East. The line traces to Songjin in Hamgyong province, now Kimchaek in North Korea, where his great-grandfather Choi Yong-nam was born in 1893.
Leningrad (Russia). At the time, this region was one of the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union.
A career defined by ambition
"We want changes!"