Alla Chereshnichenko

The secret of Tsoi's guitar

The musician’s twelve-string guitar is kept in the Viktor Tsoi Museum in the Kamchatka boiler room. For fans of Tsoi it is a sacred artifact, and for its famous owner it was a high-quality instrument made in Leningrad.

PHOTO by Vladimir NIKITIN (from the newspaper archive) " class="article-img">

Once upon a time, teenagers played not on American gadgets, but on Leningrad guitars.
PHOTO by Vladimir NIKITIN (from the newspaper archive)

As we were told at the museum, Victor bought this guitar in 1978 in Gostiny Dvor. At that time, it was one of the best guitars presented in the windows of Leningrad music stores. And it cost almost the entire average salary of a Soviet citizen. In order to complete the purchase, the future legend of Russian rock had to save the money that his parents allocated to him for food. I look at the worn label on the guitar and see the almost erased inscription “Leningrad Factory of Plucked Musical Instruments named after. A.V. Lunacharsky."

“Indeed, at that time the Leningrad Lunacharka guitars were famous not only in the USSR, but also abroad,” confirm both musicians and music masters. And the secret of the success of those guitars was, first of all, a well-structured technological chain of the production process, a serious attitude to the selection of materials and the enthusiasm of the specialists. These guitars were made mainly from spruce and birch plywood. Beech and maple were also used. Wood from the Arkhangelsk and Vologda regions was especially valued.

“As for the guitar that Viktor Tsoi had, its high quality depended, among other things, on natural technological features,” explains hereditary guitar maker Andrei Babichev. – To speed up the varnishing process, the guitars were coated with a special varnish in only one layer. The peculiarity of Soviet varnish (and there was no other) is that it dried to a smooth surface only if the thickness of the coating was more than a millimeter.”

As a result, almost all “Lunachar” guitars of that time were too heavily impregnated with this varnish, which naturally affected their sound quality. And only 12-string models were not afraid of the excessive mass of varnish due to the high tension provided by 12 metal strings swinging the soundboard.

According to the factory legend, the model for such instruments was the Spanish guitar of the famous musician Anders Segovia, who in 1927 paid a friendly visit to the Leningrad factory. He gave his instrument to the craftsmen (according to another version, they used the instrument secretly while the owner was distracted). The craftsmen studied the overseas guitar inside and out, copied patterns from it, and carefully studied the measurements and location of the springs. It was those copied patterns that served as the basis for the best domestic instruments, many of which are still alive.

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The main researcher of the history of rock music in LJ - soullaway , discovered a photo from the 1980s: Viktor Tsoi in an American music store. In general, I have long been interested in the question: what did Soviet rock musicians play in those years? I decided to do a little research on the topic.

I’ll start with Tsoi - especially since today is his birthday. I dug through the concert photos and was able to identify some of the guitars.

Let's start with something simple - perhaps the most popular electric guitar in the world: Fender Stratocaster.


However, this may be Fender, A Squier is Fender's economy brand. It’s not respectable for a professional musician to play this, but I think in the USSR in those years it was quite cool.

At least, Grebenshchikov played on the “Squire” at the famous “Musical Ring” in 1986.

Quite a famous photo:

The company is listed on the deck: Ibanez, but I couldn’t identify the model.

And the guitar - Kramer Ferrington

Another guitar from the latest - Washburn A.E..

Everything that was above was already perestroika times, the second half of the 1980s, when imported guitars were probably already available. And the following photographs are from the first half of the 1980s.

In many photos, Tsoi appears with a 12-string acoustic Leningrad factory of musical instruments named after. Lunacharsky.

By the way, Kasparian in this photo - Yamaha SG

Here's a very early photo:

The chic of those times - Czechoslovakian Jolana Star

A book about the famous rock musician was published in the ZhZL series

Three hundred and sixty pages about the childhood, youth, formation and stellar period of perhaps the main Russian rock musician - the biography consists of excerpts from interviews with relatives, friends, close or not so close people. One of the intrigues of this work is the author himself - “a lawyer from Cheboksary,” as he calls himself, and “just a fan of Tsoi” - Vitaly Kalgin, a man who, in fact, never had anything to do with the Kino group, but who nevertheless compiled a full-fledged biography.

— Vitaly, a few words about the book itself. What structure does it have?
— Since the book was published as part of ZhZL, it fully corresponds to the format of the series. The content of the publication is divided into three parts. The first is Tsoi’s childhood and youth, from 1962 to 1977. The second part covers the period from 1977 to 1987. The third tells about the stellar period of Victor’s life from 1987 to 1990.

— How is it different, if different, from other biographical works about Viktor Tsoi?
— This edition contains a lot of new materials. I collected previously unpublished interviews, memories, quotes, comments and testimonies from both the Kino musicians themselves and representatives of his inner circle. It was important for me to find as much truthful evidence as possible. In 1991, a book by St. Petersburg writer Alexander Zhitinsky and Marianna Tsoi “Viktor Tsoi. Poetry. Documentation. Memories,” which for some time became a good help for fans (in addition, Alexander Zhitinsky’s book “Tsoi forever. A documentary story” is also known. Note ed.). As for other books, alas, these were continuous repetitions timed to coincide with dates.

—Who did you meet while working on the book?
— In the process of writing the book, I met a variety of people, including Tsoi’s close circle. This was the hardest thing. So much nonsense has been written about Victor over the years that many of his friends did not want to help, or meet, or talk on the phone, a priori believing that I was just another dreamer journalist who would confuse and make things up. But as a result, I managed to talk even with those who at first categorically refused. As for specific names, then, of course, these were the Kino musicians. And also Inna Nikolaevna Golubeva, mother of Marianna Tsoi; tour director of the group Oleg Tolmachev; friends of Viktor Tsoi’s youth - Anton Galin, Igor Petrovsky and many others.

— Have there already been any responses from Victor’s father, son, friends and like-minded people to the book?
- Of course. Without the approval of the Kino musicians and Tsoi’s relatives and friends, the book would not have seen the light of day. I sent the text to everyone so that they could correct inaccuracies or express their opinions on controversial issues. I think the main thing is to give everyone the opportunity to speak. And let the reader decide who is right, who is wrong, or how everything really happened.

— Vitaly, tell us about yourself. What do you do?
— For the last two years I have been working on a book. It all started as a hobby, but it began to take up more and more time. In the future, I will either return to legal practice or continue my research.

“No politics, purely inner peace”

From the biography a rather definite image of Viktor Tsoi appears. A person with a “rare melodic gift” and “impeccable hearing.” Persistent and hardworking - if this concerns his favorite business. Simple in everyday life, restrained, focused. And at the same time fun and light. And also, according to those closest to him, extremely vulnerable.

This is how his friend Maxim Pashkov characterized him, talking about the crazy youthful parties in the company of the first St. Petersburg punks: “We must pay tribute to Victor. Although he participates in these events, compared to others, he retains a human face, a sense of humor and does not descend into vulgarity. Tsoi was much more conservative than the rest of the company, and never went all the way in our “fun”. There was never any licentiousness about him.”

The leader of the “AU” group, Andrei Panov, shares a rather funny story about the purchase of his first professional guitar: “My parents went south and left Tsoi ninety rubles at the rate of three a day. And Tsoi had a dream, like everyone else - a twelve-string guitar. He ran and bought it immediately. It cost 87 rubles. And for change, since I was hungry, I bought whites for sixteen kopecks from Victory Park. And that means I filled them up on an empty stomach. He remembered this for a very long time afterwards. He said he was lying green, alone in the apartment, dying. There was no way to get to the toilet. I lay there for several days. I haven’t eaten whites since then.”

“Then it was like a tank,” Boris Grebenshchikov recalls about his first meeting with Tsoi. “I couldn’t even imagine that an author of such magnitude grew up in Kupchin and is still unknown to anyone.” The next day I started calling my sound engineer friends, persuading them to immediately record Tsoi’s songs while the guys still wanted to play. I’m very happy that I was at the right moment at the right time.”

There is a rather unexpected episode about one of Tsoi’s works, told by Inna Nikolaevna Golubeva: “He got a job as a worker in the park management department, where he carved a children’s wooden sculpture in the Quiet Rest park on Kamennoostrovsky Prospekt, 81.” You can still see some of Victor’s works in that park, for example “Sad Lion”...

“Tsoi is not an actor - things are not going well for him with the gift of transformation,” the book cites the memoirs of Artemy Troitsky. “He hooked the audience with something else.” Maybe precisely because there is not a drop of fuss or strumming in him, but there is reliability, calmness and honesty. It is not surprising that in our hysterical times, many see in him, if not a savior, then at least a real hero.”

And here’s what Georgy Guryanov said about the so-called revolutionary nature of his songs: “About the song “Changes.” There is no politics in it. Absolutely. An absolutely philosophical treatise, there is not a word about politics, it is purely an inner world...”