1.Gopnik
Where: Russia
When: 1990s
The image of a Gopnik in a fake Adidas track suit squatting in the side of a road with a cigarette dangling from his mouth has become iconic one and one of the most recognizable images of Russia on the Internet. Gopniks certainly appear weird to the Western world, but in Russia these young people are a common appearance. Born in poverty, on margins of society where violence is preferred form of communication, Gopniks have been present in Russia for a long time, although the modern version originated in the 1990s, in the dark times of post-Soviet collapse. The term itself comes from acronym GOP (Gorodskoe Obshestvo Prizreniye), meaning City Public Charity, describing people living in public housing in the beginning on the 20th century, before the revolution. The staples have remained the same: opiates consumption, high crime rates, and general lawlessness. Gopniks are the only group on our list of weird subcultures around the world that didn’t choose to belong together but were rather born into the subculture.
