Interview with Viktor Tsoi and Natalia Razlogova. Conducted by Sergei Sholokhov at the Golden Duke Film Festival in Odessa, 1988

This eight-minute interview, which took place on a cruise ship named after the famed Russian opera singer Feodor Chaliapin chartered for Odessa’s Golden Duke Film Festival in September 1988, depicts rock musician Viktor Tsoi and film critic Natalia Razlogova speaking to a journalist about the insurmountable generational tensions that inhabit the Soviet film industry. Tsoi was attending the festival to promote Rashid Nugmanov’s film The Needle (Igla, 1988) as it was making its domestic festival circuit debut. The conversation centers around Tsoi’s sense of incongruency among his fellow festival attendees. Both the rock musician and Razlogova maintain that Tsoi as a public figure and The Needle as a cultural phenomenon and cinematic text exist outside of the mainstream Soviet film discourse, which has made attending the Golden Duke a less than pleasant experience. One noteworthy moment occurs when Razlogova openly references the extent of Tsoi’s unprecedented fame and cultural influence as the Soviet Union’s ultimate rock icon. Razlogova goes on to state that the stylistically and thematically unadventurous film festival has chosen to showcase what she deems to be unfashionable “pop’s movies” (papino kino), and that even the young people present at the event (apart from herself, Tsoi, and Nugmanov, of course) are artificially compelled to look and act passé. The interviewer Sergei Sholokhov (later made famous for engineering the notorious “Lenin is a mushroom” hoax with avant-garde composer Sergei Kuryokhin on Leningrad television in 1991) at one point uses the name of celebrated Soviet filmmaker Eldar Ryazanov as point of contrast to Tsoi and Nugmanov. Tsoi and Razlogova’s comments reflect the general state of despondency and disenfranchisement experienced by increasingly western-oriented late-Soviet youth, forced to navigate the uncomfortable and newly bewildering cultural protocols of what they perceive as the Soviet past.