Please join us for a three-day international conference that focuses on the cultural legacy of Viktor Tsoi, Russia’s most influential and enduring rock star. The goal of this symposium is to evaluate the role that Viktor Tsoi and rock music in general played in the collapse of the Soviet state and to educate UR students, faculty, and the community at large about the nature and power of popular music in the late Soviet period. Tsoifest will feature two academic panels, two keynote addresses, two film screenings with director Q&A, a roundtable discussion, and an evening musical performance by a UR alumni Viktor Tsoi tribute band Kino Proby. Leading scholars of late Soviet culture as well as Tsoi’s close associates and collaborators will attempt to establish a discourse of Tsoi’s cultural significance and national mythology from the perspectives of musicology, sociology, history, performance, media, and film studies. Tsoi’s position as an emblem of the collapse of the Soviet Union sheds light on the ways his legacy is reinterpreted and reimagined within Russia’s contemporary sociopolitical environment, probing the cultural mechanisms that have contributed to an increase in nationalist and increasingly isolationist attitudes in Russia in the wake of the war in Ukraine. A UR Humanities Project, Tsoifest is co-sponsored by the departments of Modern Languages & Cultures, Music, History, Russian Studies, Visual & Cultural Studies, and the Skalny Center for Polish and Central European Studies.