All About Latvia

Walking through an underpass near a giant city market, I spotted a man who took me back to the years of wild capitalism of the early 1990s.

Dressed in a sports track suit, the man, probably in his late 40s, carried around a large black plastic bag stretching almost to the ground. His shaved head reflected the sun that shone upon it accentuating his rather never-smiling Russian face, making him look in every way intimidating.

Add a man-purse for his cell phone to the whole ensemble and you’ve got yourself a typical small businessman of the early 90s, who has a notoriously criminal and aggressive reputation.

Anthropologists, or simple folk like myself, call them in Russian gopniki, or urlas, in Latvian.

And today, they’re a dying breed.

The name urla itself has come from the Russian word orly. In the beginning of 90s, criminals used to call themselves orly or eagles, which lead to the creation of the word “urla”.

The term is mainly used by Latvian middle class teenagers, and the meaning is similar to the British slang word Ned.

Gopniki, the history tells us, first appeared in Petrograd, following the Bolshevik coup in 1917. They were peasants and other riff-raff who came to the Russian capital in search of employment, only to become pick-pocketers. They flooded into some city areas transforming them into gangsta’s paradise. Since then, the word evolved, the meaning changed.

Today, “gopnik” refers to any Russian with a clean shaved head, superfluous leather jacket, unfortunate leather shoes. It could also refer to the guy squatting in courtyard in his track suit and slippers, pounding a bottle of cheap beer and spitting seeds, occasionally snapping at his wife to keep her mouth shut.

In the early 1990s, during the era of the Wild Wild East, they were ethnic Russians in the Baltics and other former Soviet republics, who dealt with business like a good father-mafiosi.

Back then, urlas roamed city markets and center in search of their prey, be it extort money from their innocent victims, or simply to beat them up. They carried around large car mobile phones, marking them as better than you. Their outfit combination had as much sense as the Bonaparti.lv’s. Sports track pants and leather jacket, sneakers, or sometimes shoes. I’ve always found them to be really funny, but not a ha-ha funny, but more like, rolled down the window with your foot on the accelerator as you run the red light funny.

In Riga, there are still a few places where you can spot gopniks in their natural habitat: at a rundown, cheap coffee shop, where bad techno music blasts, somewhere on town’s outskirts.

A guide into this post-Soviet subculture suggests a few places a traditional tourist would be smart to avoid.

“Have you ever secretly wanted to visit a bar of the lowest class in a neighborhood in Riga,” asks the guide. “Where shaved young people with sports track suits hang out, with the Russian language heard around them, where beer is at least 20 percent cheaper, not to mention the vine or other alcoholic drinks…

Less than a dozen places in Riga can be called a gangsta’s paradise. The resurrection of gopniki at the demise of the Soviet Union proved to be the beginning of the end for this wonderful subculture.

The dumb, dangerous urlas gave way to a sophisticated Western businessman. The dangerous coffee shop hangouts gave way to British pubs, restaurants. Capitalism, as it turned out, evolves, grows, expands, matures. And urlas are thankfully being left behind.

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This entry was posted on Friday, June 15th, 2007 at 0.48 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.