The Influence of Political and Social Changes on the Formation and Development of the Youth Rave culture in Russia in the 90s

The collapse of the Soviet Union created a completely new socio-political and cultural situation in Russia. The ideas of socialism and the communist system have fallen. Although the times of Perestroika were already a great prerequisite for such changes, what happened immediately after the collapse of the Union made each person rethink how seemingly familiar parameters of his personal life and his vision of his country as a whole. A pre-existing superpower quickly turned into a troubled country with a developing market economy. Also, Russia became for the first time in many decades completely open to influence from both foreign Western culture and Eastern culture. These changes opened up a huge range of opportunities for the search for a new cultural identity, which would be based on both positive national traditions and international experience. Moreover, a feature of the new socio-political and cultural situation was the possibility of developing their own version of the answer to these challenges for different social strata of the population. It is one of such subcultures that developed at that time in the youth environment — rave culture — that we consider in this work.