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Out of context: Reply #13650
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For months now, our foreign readers have been asking us, "What's a gopnik?" They have a vague idea of what a gopnik looks like, thanks to our Face Control page: tough Russian dudes with bad skin and blank fuck-if-I-care expressions. They're the guys who look more comfortable squatting than standing. But more than anything else, they're the last males on planet earth who can get away with wearing those 20s-style leather gangster caps without looking like drama school fags rehearsing for a musical.
What makes the gopniki so fucking cool to behold is that they exist beyond irony. If the gopniki are anything, they are "authentic." In an era in which "authenticity" is the most valued and rarest attribute of all, the gopniki rank at the top of the white world's coolness hierarchy.
Proof of their authenticity lies in their incredibly bold tastes, a combination of cheese, menace, and Third World flash so brash that even the avant-est Western hipster couldn't possibly imagine it, because even if he or she did, it would inevitably come off as kitsch and harmless in their bourgeois hands. Even the fact that gopniki love blasting techno, singing shitty karaoke in cheap cafes with blinking disco lights, or wearing cheap pointy leather shoes to match their 20s Ragtime kepka-tabletka caps, can't diminish their status as the baddest-assed white guys on Planet Earth.
But the story of Russia's gopniki isn't a simple celebration of undiscovered authentic-coolness. Rather, it's a tragedy of literary proportions. Like Faulkner's Old South, or Tolstoi's fading landed gentry, the story of Russia's gopniki is the tragic tale of a dying breed of a once-proud people. Charles Portis wrote that whenever a guidebook refers to a country's people as being "proud," it usually means "barely human" in the special lingo of those guidebooks. In the case of the gopniki, they really are barely human, and that's why they're so fucking awesome.
Take the word "gopnik": rarely does a word so seamlessly match the object that it signifies. The "gop" is brutal, dumb, and funny, but not funny like "I'll laugh in the gopnik's face" funny. It's funny in a very private way, safely inside your car, with the doors locked and the windows up, and the foot on the pedal, and the wife and kids screaming not to stop at the red light.
* * *
How and where did gopnik culture start?
The word "gopnik" wasn't a clever poet's invention, but rather it comes, as so many cool Russian words do, from an acronym: Gosudarstvenoe Obshezhitie Proletariata, or "State Dormitory of the Proletariat." Add the "nik" to the G.O.P., and a species is born.
And born it was, according to legend, in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution. According to the best accounts we have, including that of Leningrad's lead singer Shnur, gopniki were originally peasants and landless riff-raff who came to Petrograd in the 1920s in search of work. They poured out of Petrograd's train stations, and found residences, if lucky, in newly transformed dormitories, where they transformed themselves into the first local ghetto gangstas in Soviet Russia.
The gopnik species even has an exact locus: Ligovsky Prospekt, dom 10. It was the Oktyabrskaya Hotel, which the Soviets turned into a downtown dormitory for incoming proletarians, but which, in the hands of the gopniki, was transformed into their own collectivized gangsta crib.
Since they were village outsiders, often from broken families, many with histories of petty crime or worse, the gopniki were despised by the Petrograd/Leningrad natives. They became legends as outlaws and toughs who couldn't be broken by the Soviet system. They had their own code of ethics and lived by their own rules, their own knuckle tats and styles, sort of like the vori v zakoni of the misdemeanor world of hooligans.
Over time, as gopnik fashion, slang, and attitude spread throughout the country's lower classes, the meaning of the word changed. Rather than referring to the specific phenomenon of village toughs living in the Oktyabrskaya Hotel, "gopnik" referred to any Russian brute with a shaven head, thick leather jacket, ridiculous leather shoes, and the ubiquitous kepka-tabletka. It could also refer to the guy squatting in courtyard in his track suit and tapochki, pounding a bottle of cheap Zhigulovskoe beer and spitting seeds, occasionally snapping at his wife to keep her mouth shut, since her only job is to take their baby on a stroll in the second-hand Turkish baby carriage that he pinched from the front of someone's izba...In the 90s, it seemed that the gopniki were poised to inherit, if not the earth, then at least 1/6 of the earth's land mass. Gopniki ranged across all of Russia's fabled 11 time zones, from the now-defunct Intourist Hotel lobby just a couple hundreds meters from Red Square, to the kiosk-lined walkway along Vladivostok's shoreline, and all points in between. Gopniki, or at least Russian men who'd adopted the gopnik look, seemed to be moving into every sphere of life, from "biznes," where they served as the muscle, to politics, where, as LDPR deputies they formed the core resistance to Westernization. The entire nation had gone gopnik: shaven heads, hardened post-zona expressions, and an uncanny nose for cheesy clothes, no matter how much they cost. Some traded in their leather coats and tracksuit tops for maroon Hugo Boss blazers. They couldn't resist adding bling to the mix: gold chains, necklaces and bracelets, fancy watches that were so gold and shiny that they crossed back over to looking like cheap Vietnamese knock-offs, even if they were real. Best of all, the 90s was accompanied by the ultimate gopnik soundtrack: nonstop shitty techno music, blaring out of every restaurant, every shawarma stand and kiosk, every Zhiguli or stolen Merc, every hotel room converted into an "ofis." No matter where you turned in 1990s Russia, you simply could not escape bad techno music.
What no one understood then, and what few understand even today, is that the 1990s wasn't so much the high-water mark for the Gopnik Nation, as the Beginning of the End.
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Last weekend, we decided to take a Gopniki Safari, to do some field anthropology work in order to bring the world of the gopnik to you, the eXile reader. We asked around for the best place to go gopnik-spotting, and got all sorts of answers from our Russian friends.
"They're everywhere!"
"Go to any Russian town."
"You don't even have to leave Moscow. Just pick a metro stop outside of the ring line, they'll come to you."
The most interesting response came from our own Vika Bruk, who used to write the Generation Eltiny column: "Try going to 'Velikie Luki.' The Great Onions! That's where, like, ALL of my relatives live - my aunt who works at a textile factory, her alcoholic husband, my cousin Maxim who's a guard, my other cousin Alexei who's also a guard for a bank, my other cousin Natasha who's getting divorced from her lazy asshole husband, my uncle Alexander, who sells Chinese shoes at the market, his son Alexander who's in the army, his other son Edward, I don't know what he's doing. So, yeah, there are plenty of gopniki - my entire family."