Russia's Most HATED Sub-Culture..

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The gopnik took over the world via meme culture in 2010s, but where didnit come from?

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[JimmyTheGiant]

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[Bill_the_Redneck]

As a Russian I was hoping for you to cover gopniks after the chavs video. At least in Moscow they are far less common than they were in the mid 2000s. But I believe they are big outside of big cities. Teens nowadays are much more influenced by western culture, but there are a lot of places where everything western is hated and gopniks represent the "true and cool" Russian youth. But I regularly see a lot of people in their 30s or 40s dressed like gopniks. And also they behave like them

[jakefinnegan]

Hard bass was linked to gopniks only ironically. I didn't know any gopnik who would listen to this at the time. The gopniks I know listened to prison songs (Blatnyak), pop songs and generic EDM. Maaaybe low quality russian rap. And yes, the big gopnik wave happened not so long after gopnik hard bass meme was born. Also, the winter hat of choice was a short beanie (worn on top of the head when just hanging around or walking around drunk). Thanks for the video, Jimmy!

[iscander_s]

The most hilarious part of this for me, as a citizen of Russia who grew up in that time, is the fact that "gopnik subculture" was basically dead and extinct by 2012, the same goes for hardbass (nobody actually called it that back in the day, it was "pump") the last time I've seen people listening to it unironically was 2005-06. It was the Western memes, what basically resurrected it in 2014 and created a subculture, that never actually existed as is.

[impamp]

About Adidas culture: as a Russian, i think you made it kinda more complicated as it is IRL. During 90s there was no chance that some gopniks could afford themselves original adi clothes. So they went to one of the street markets, where there were lots of striped sport cloths (basically poormade adidas copies). They were cheap, affordable. And so that is how it started :D

[pm-]

As a famous Russian poet once said: Tri poloski, tri-po tri poloski. hard bass tusovki, adidas krossovki.

[VasiliyOgniov]

Loved the vid, altough as the native Russian citizen, who lived through 00's criticism I have a bit of points to correct. For example - Hardbass, despite it being associated with gopniks nowadays, was nowhere to be found at the time. It was in fact "blatnyak" (from Russian criminal jargon "blatnoy" - pronounced like "blat-noj" - roughly "respectable criminal"), which was a mix of chanson and author's song mainly focused on life of crime, philosophy and, bizzarely, religion (offtop: fun fact, around 80% of post-Soviet countries' criminals consider themselves orthodox) and our own kind of gangsta rap, which became popular around 2003-2004.
They were widespread among the whole post-Soviet space, because most of these kids were children of criminals which served their sentence or at least grew up in the Soviet Union, so saying that they were entirely Russian thing is not really fair - there were plenty of gopniks in Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus, for example. Russia is just the biggest of them all.
And, well, gopniks were not a subculture, they were more like a lifestyle. Like, in the place where I grew up, you was gopnik by default and had a chance to evolve into something else if you had enough willpower or was unlucky enough to not became a part of any social group. Gopnik is not about style, or music, or whatever. Gopnik is about petty crime, "ponyatiya" (which means "terms", as in "termin" - pronounced like "pawn-ja-tea-ja" - which was a sort of unwritten codex of rules among post-Soviet criminals which they pretty strictly obeyed), and street life. They were mostly uneducated, had little to no parental care (if they had parents at all - mind you, it was 90's-00's we are talking about, it was a really rough time out there) and came from a really poor conditions

[omarkharnivall]

In Brazil Adidas and Nike were quite expensive due to taxes and poor wages.

So it was fashionable and a status symbol. I was quite shocked when I came to Japan and saw how affordable they were.

Still I wore them everywhere because they look good and are quite comfortable until a japanese friend told me that to japanese ppl those kinda of clothes are specific for sports and that if you wear them everywhere it gives the impression that your wardrobe is poor 😭

[doBobro]

The core of gopniks is not about look, it is about crime activity. It's "honorable" to steal mobile or money on streets. The verb is "гопнуть" — to gopnut' or gopnoot', last syllable is u, don't know how to transliterate it properly. I remember a case with a master class of senior gopnicks taught gopnick-juniors how to approach a person to frighten them and make successful steal. Our group were bigger and master-class was not very successful.

[jasonpatterson]

The "Slav squat" is something that people all over the world do. It's an apparently comfortable position to assume in a place where there is nowhere to sit. It's also called the "Asian squat" because you see tons of people in the far East doing it for the exact same reason. If you don't do it regularly then you probably aren't flexible enough to just give it a go and not stress your knees, but if it's something that you do daily then it's supposedly comfortable.

[ditmartannenwald]

As a person born and raised in a provincial Russian town, I spent all my childhood and youth amidst the gopniks constantly being one of their potential victims 😅 I would say that our gopniks have never been organized and have never formed something like a subcultural movement.

They were just a product of total poverty and depression after the fall of Soviet Union. People lost their jobs because factories were stopped and closed. Those who were working for government run enterprises in the education and health care systems managed to keep their positions but had not being paid for months. Police forces and army were deeply corrupted so they can not control the streets.

So, "gopnik" was just the convenient word for designation of those uneducated and uncultured hooligans and small criminals who flooded the streets in the situation when there were no police control.

Interestingly, Adidas sportswear was really percieved as prestigious those days but common people mostly just went to the local bazaar and bought cheap tracksuits and shoes imported from Turkey, China or Vietnam. I personally had never been in the branded clothing store till I reached eighteen and went to Moscow 😅

So, gopniks are not memebers of a subculture like skinheads, goths or emo-kids. They were almost "normies" of those tough times on post-Soviet territory.

[RhythmAddictedState]

As a Russian, I've always considered gopniks as a social class, not a subculture. They simply were dirt poor, disenfranchised people and/or petty criminals who likely grew up in "unfavourable circumstances", to put it mildly (gangs, prison, violence, neglectful families, no education, etc). It wasn't about esthetics. The fact that there are people in the West who love the esthetics is a bit weird to me lol
Btw, gopniks never listened to hardbass (which actually originated in the UK! It was called donk/hard bounce/pumping house/...). This genre just ended up being associated with the gopnik "esthetics" because the music sounded oldschool and very late 90s-early 2000's. In Russia, this genre is considered as a joke rather than something serious. Some hardbass producers aren't even Russian speakers...

[KvapuJanjalia]

This video taught me that Moscow is pronounced as "Mockba". Thank you for accurate information.

[theoneandonlyCQ]

So are we just gonna pretend that Russian Hard Bass doesn't go hard?😭

[auroranamex]

As a Russian I can say this video 's reality/internet memes ratio is around 60/40. The hard bass connection is for sure just a meme. They usually listen to the Russian criminal music and to "gopnik boom bap"

[dmitryberezin]

I lived in the nineties in a small town in Siberia. No one was called gopnik in my environment, only a normal kid or a man and a sucker. It was only after moving to a big city to study, after I joined the dnb club subculture in the early 2000s, that it became clear to me that everyone I used to know was a gopnik, and I myself was like that.

[ganiniii]

First time I came across this urban tribe was 2006. In Japan this culture made huge success back then and it was widely adapted in japanese mangas. Street villains always hangout like gopniks to this day.

[Victorromain]

Very funny and very true - I lived in Russia in the 1990s and some of my very first friends were Gopniks - the local lads where I was living at the time. We had some laughs - they even taught me to sit like - like well, a Gopnik as well as the history of sitting as such. They were all teenagers and good guys!

[Piqus]

Similar thing we have in Poland, we just call them dudes differently: "Dresiarz" instead of "Gopnik". The name comes from their sporty wear, which in Polish is called "Dres". These outfits should be preferably also made by Adidas or, eventually, by Nike (shoes, of course, as well). Usually one can hear from them "Szefie, dasz 5 zloty na piwko?" (Boss, can you give me 5 zloty for a beer?) and "Masz problem?" (Do you have a problem?), least of them usually followed by "Chcesz wpierdol?" or "Wyjebać ci? (both "Do you wanna a beating?"). Yep, surely different countries, but similar cultures.

[woodylol]

@3:54 i see what you did there, EATING IS A PASS TIME