ABSTRACT
In the course of the campaign for glasnost, the Soviet press started to discuss in some detail the problem of informal groups in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Soviet newspapers admitted that such groups started to appear as early as twenty years earlier; they numbered in the thousands. Active in the nineteen-seventies, by the early nineteen-eighties the groups were well established. By 1986, their numbers were, as the youth daily Komsomo lskaia pravda put it, growing as fast as mushrooms in the rain. The Soviet press carried letters from young people mentioning the existence of informal groups in almost every city and even village. The most common kind of informal group consisted of young people interested in music--mostly rock and pop— who formed amateur music ensembles. An attempt was made in the early nineteen-eighties to register these ensembles.
