Nieformalne grupy i ruchy społeczne w ostatnich latach ZSRR
Informal Groups and Social Movements in the Last Years of the USSR

Summary/Abstract: The article presents the genesis, activity and specifi city of informal organizations and movements in the last years of the USSR. It was a period of new opportunities in the activities of the movements that had been operating outside the official public sphere so far. The new policy of the authorities, announced by the leadership of the CPSU led by Mikhail Gorbachev in April 1985, had a severe impact on social awareness and aroused broad mass activity in formulating alternative proposals in all areas of the development of public life. This led to the emergence and development of informal associations (commonly known as the Informals [Russian: неформалы] in connotation with formal forms of social consolidation) in the Soviet state, which overnight became active participants in the social and political life of the state. It was a time of the formation of new patterns of political behaviour, mass political participation and the creation of new socio-political institutions. In turn, the Informals were the most stable and longest-functioning core of civil society in the USSR, an element that effectively united it at that time.

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