Gopnik

The collective noun is gopota (Russian: гопота). The subculture of gopota has its roots in working-class communities in the late Russian Empire and gradually emerged underground during the later half of the 20th century in many cities in the Soviet Union.^[4][5] It was the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, during the collapse of the Soviet Union and its associated rise in poverty, that saw the gopota subculture truly come to fruition and flourish.^[6]

These years—between the late 1980s and roughly 2001—were the time when the gopota subculture was at its greatest extent, though it remained prevalent, albeit in decline, throughout much of the former Soviet space into the 2000s. As of the late 2010s, the subculture has faded for the most part, although

Folk etymology connects the word to the GOP, the acronym for the Gorodskoye Obshezhitie Proletariata (Local dormitory for proletariat). These were almshouses for the destitute created by the Bolshevik government after the October Revolution in 1917.

A more plausible origin is the onomatopoeic гоп (gop), which represents a swift act of grabbing or striking, likely via the slang term го́пать (gopat'), which means to mug or rob.

According to the Russian