Gruppa krovi

Kino first played "Gruppa krovi" on 3 June 1987 at the fifth Leningrad Rock Club festival, and according to people who were there, the audience received it coolly, perhaps because they were waiting for the hits they already knew. Two artist friends, Sergei "Afrika" Bugaev and Andrei Krisanov, filled in on drums and bass that night. Within a few years the song would be one of the best known in the Russian language. Who gave Viktor Tsoi the idea is disputed. Vsevolod Gakkel of Aquarium believed he had once tossed out the phrase "blood type" in conversation as a possible band name. The actor Alexander Bashirov told a different story in several interviews: that he turned up in a tank jacket with a diamond and the number 3 bleached onto the sleeve, joked to Tsoi that it was his blood type, and Tsoi turned that into the soldier's blood type on a sleeve in the song. The band recorded the album mostly in drummer Georgy Guryanov's apartment, alongside the filming of the movie Assa. The lyric describes a fateful road that could be avoided but must be taken, and some writers hear it as an anti-war song. Released in 1988 at the height of perestroika, the album became Kino's most popular, and in 1999 Nashe Radio named the title track the best Russian rock song of the century. It reached new listeners abroad through Grand Theft Auto IV, and in 2019 Metallica played it in Moscow, nearly three decades after Tsoi's death in 1990.