Viktor Tsoi

The family's Korean ancestry can be traced back to Songjin, Hamgyong, Korea (present-day Kimchaek, North Korea), where Viktor's great-grandfather Choi Yong-nam was born in 1893.

His Korean clan is the Wonju Choe clan.

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 (the building is now an architectural monument).

For some time Tsoi studied at a nearby school in Frunze Street, where his mother worked.

He was the only child of Valentina Vasilyevna Tsoi (Guseva), 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.

Viktor Robertovich Tsoi (Виктор Робертович Цой; ; 21 June 1962 – 15 August 1990) was a Soviet singer-songwriter and actor who co-founded Kino, one of the most popular and musically influential bands in the history of Russian music.

Born and raised in Leningrad (now known as Saint Petersburg), Tsoi started writing songs as a teenager.

Throughout his career, Tsoi contributed a plethora of musical and artistic works, including ten albums.

Viktor Robertovich Tsoi was born on 21 June 1962, in a maternity hospital on Kuznetsovskaya Street in Leningrad.

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.

However, 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 (Пилигримы), and Tsoi, who played bass guitar in the group Palata # 6 (Палата № 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 had begun 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.

From 1974 until 1977, Tsoi attended a secondary art school, where he was a member of the band Palata No. 6 (Палата № 6, English: "Ward No. 6").

From 1977, he attended the Serov Art School, until he was expelled in 1979 for poor performance.

Afterwards, he attended SGPTU-61, a secondary city vocational school, where he studied to become a wood carver.

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 summer of 1981, Tsoi, Rybin, and Oleg Valinsky formed the band Garin i giperboloydy (Гарин и Гиперболоиды).

The name was a homage to the classic Russian novel The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin by Aleksey Tolstoy.

In autumn of the same year, 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.

Kino began recording its debut album, 45, in the spring of 1982 at Andrei Tropillo's studio.

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 their high-profile concert at the 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 car collision.

He is regarded as one of the most important pioneers of rock music in Russia and is credited with popularizing the genre throughout the Soviet Union.

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 Tsoi became popular by combining his music and lyrics with philosophy.