Authors

Discussion

This paper aims to reveal the emergence, operation, and transformation of the grassroots groups involved in ecological and historic preservation during Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms of glasnost and perestroika in Leningrad. Rather than focusing on dissidence or resistance, the paper explores how the youth adapted outside and within existing institutional structures while attempting to transform them from the inside in line with a literal understanding of perestroika’s policies and searched for a secure language of expressing dissent with local urban planning. In doing so, this work examines the dynamic and modalities of the youth self-organisation which with the advance of Gorbachev's policies faced inevitably with the state retaliatory measures. The existing scholarship on the subject presents quite a superficial overview either of the grassroots organisational practices or the properties of interaction with Komsomol and other authorities. By bringing forward new primary sources, I intend to fill in the scholar lacuna by overcoming the generalisation and a one-dimensionality inherent in existing scholarship and blurring the line between what is (and was) considered “oppositional”, “unofficial/non-formal”, “anti-Soviet” versus “institutional”, “official/formal”, “pro-Soviet”.