English

 Kino - Кино

Kino was a Soviet rock band formed in Leningrad in 1982, considered to be one of, if not the greatest rock band in the history of Russian music. The band was co-founded and headed by Viktor Tsoi, who wrote the music and lyrics for almost all of the band's songs. Over the course of eight years, Kino released over 90 songs spanning over seven studio albums, as well as releasing a few compilations and live albums. The band's music was also widely circulated in the form of bootleg recordings through the underground magnitizdat distribution scene. Viktor Tsoi died in a car accident in 1990. Shortly after his passing, the band broke up after releasing their final album, consisting of songs that Tsoi and the group were working on in the months before his death.

In 2019, the band announced a reunion with concerts planned in the fall of 2020 for the first time in 30 years, however they were later postponed to 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Kino was formed in 1981 by the members of two earlier groups from Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg), Palata No. 6 and Piligrimy. They initially called themselves Garin i giperboloidy (Russian: Гарин и гиперболоиды, lit. 'Garin and the Hyperboloids') after Aleksei Tolstoi's novel The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin. The group consisted of Viktor Tsoi, guitarist Aleksei Rybin, and drummer Oleg Valinsky . They began rehearsing, but Valinsky was drafted and had to leave the band. In the spring of 1982, they began to perform at the Leningrad Rock Club and met with the influential underground musician Boris Grebenshchikov. It was around this time that they changed the band's name to Kino. The name was chosen because it was considered short and "synthetic," and the band members took pride in that it had only two syllables and was easy to pronounce by speakers all over the world. Tsoi and Rybin later said that they had the idea for the name after seeing a bright cinema sign.

As one of the first Russian rock bands, Kino greatly influenced later bands. On 31 December 1999, Russian rock radio station Nashe Radio announced the 100 best Russian rock songs of the 20th century based on listener votes. Kino had ten songs in the list, more than any other band, and "Gruppa Krovi" took the first place. The Russian newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda listed Kino as the second most influential Russian band ever (after Alisa.) In addition, "Gruppa Krovi" was listed as one of forty songs that changed the world in a 2007 Russian-language edition of Rolling Stone.