Viktor Tsoi’s Cyberpunk International

• In Event: Left Perspectives on Cultures of Decline I: Forgotten Futures of Late- and Post-Socialism

Abstract

At the time of his 1990 death, Viktor Tsoi was slated to star in a U.S.-Soviet film entitled "Citadel of Death", co-written by cyberpunk author William Gibson and Kazakh New Wave director Rashid Nugmanov. Set in a post-apocalyptic Leningrad marked by a “weird mix of socialism and wild capitalism,” it was to have featured Tsoi (reprising the role of Moro from Nugmanov’s "Needle") defeating a television demagogue seeking to restore past Russian glory. Focusing on the detailed film treatments drafted by Gibson and Nugmanov, this paper finds in the never-completed project an international cyberpunk subculture built on the ruins of cold war binaries; and articulating open-ended understandings of both race and history.

Author

• Steven Lee, UC Berkeley