Prior to the publication of this book, little was known about Soviet hippies, a group whose existence scarcely registered among Sovietologists. And not surprisingly, hippies’ lives and ideas are topics extremely difficult to research. Hippies themselves generally scorned the production of written records, while KGB documents based on surveillance and interrogation are problematic and often inaccessible. To explore this missing chapter in Soviet history, Juliane Fürst conducted 135 interviews, traveling everywhere from Cheliabinsk to California to talk with past members of the Soviet hippie community. Her immense effort paid off, as the result is an extremely rich story; one that brings to life the personalities and experiences of her subjects, many of whom are also pictured in dozens of photographs throughout the book.
Hippie counterculture, ironically, was introduced to the Soviet audience by official publications. Two 1967 articles in Pravda and the journal Rovesnik described American and British hippies as youth who rejected bourgeois materialism at every turn. They refused to work, grew their hair long, and dyed their own clothes. An article the following year in Vokrug sveta told of hippies throwing dollar bills in protest from a staircase at the New York Stock Exchange. Given that American hippies were rebelling against capitalism, how did hippie counterculture gain a foothold in the Soviet Union? After all, the essence of the Soviet system was its purported anti-capitalism. As Fürst explains, “The entire existence of these hippies exuded a sense of freedom, which was so absent in the prim norms that governed Soviet youth” (41). The oppressive nature of the Soviet order, with its enforced social conformity, produced fertile ground for rebellion against behavioral strictures. More broadly, Fürst points out that hippies were emblematic of people's growing disillusionment in the late Soviet period.
While most Soviet hippies started by listening to the Beatles and reading about American hippies, their lives and social networks soon evolved in response to the repressive habitat in which they resided. Following mass arrests during a 1971 demonstration in Moscow, the hippie movement was no longer populated by university students but rather by hardcore hippies. These “professional hippies,” as Fürst calls them, were “people who were prepared to sacrifice the advantages of a stable Soviet life for their own little corners of freedom and fun” (180). They took menial jobs, experimented with drugs, and traveled to hippie havens in other Soviet republics. Some features of Soviet life, such as guaranteed employment and the low cost of food, actually facilitated hippies’ lifestyles in many ways.
On the surface, Soviet hippies looked much like their counterparts in the west. But Fürst argues that the very rigidity of the Soviet system ensured a longevity to the Soviet hippie community that was impossible to sustain in the liberal west. Indeed, Fürst concludes that hippies and the Soviet establishment had a hostile yet symbiotic relationship. She writes: “After the regime decided in the early 1970s to persecute the domestic hippie community, the two remained in a destructive, but ultimately stable embrace” (182). While counterintuitive, her conclusion is proven by the fact that Soviet hippiedom's demise was precipitated not by KGB repression but rather by its disappearance, and the arrival of capitalism in the 1990s. A counterculture based on rebellion against the Soviet system could not continue without its foil.
Fürst's book represents an impressive scholarly accomplishment. The oral history interviews she conducted allow her both to analyze and to preserve hippies’ life stories, which otherwise might have been lost. Moreover, her research illustrates the unconventionality of hippie counterculture that existed beneath the façade of a tightly controlled Soviet society. While some may object that Fürst goes too far by characterizing late Soviet socialism as “in effect a pluralistic society” (11), her work clearly demonstrates that this society was much more diverse than is generally assumed. In addition, one cannot help but admire the hippies Fürst describes, given that—in the face of enormous repression—they spurned social conformity to pursue their own lifestyles and their own freedom. Fürst celebrates them as “beacons of ‘otherness’—an exciting, colourful, engaging, rebellious, fun-loving, individual, tolerant, curious, creative otherness” (442). As the metaphor in the book's title indicates, Soviet hippies were like flowers that somehow pushed through cracks in the Soviet concrete and bloomed.
