Consolidation

This chapter continues the chronological history of the Soviet hippie movement. It turns its gaze specifically on Moscow, where Iurii Burakov (alias Solntse) was instrumental in creating a loose association of hippies and their friends, which soon became known as the sistema. It explores the personality of Iura, who left a rich archive of auto-biographical writing, revealing a thoughtful young man steeped in his Soviet socialization, which left him with a strong desire for self-improvement and a collective mission. With greater organization on the part of the hippies, the state also mustered a stronger response. Both developments culminated in the 1 June 1971 demonstration, organized by Iura Burakov as a collective action against the American war in Vietnam, but which de facto was used by the authorities as a sting operation to capture the data of Moscow hippies and their like-minded peers. The demonstration resulted in the arrest of hundreds of hippies, possibly more than a thousand. Iura Burakov was left with the tarnished reputation of a potential traitor, entangled in the web of KGB tactics, which were first directed at destroying, later at co-opting the sistema.

Materiality

Hippies generally understood themselves as a non-materialistic and anti-materialist movement. This chapter uses a material prism to explore Soviet hippie culture: their things. Ironically material items were of the utmost importance to a community whose ideas included a strong commitment to non-materiality. Yet, as the chapter demonstrates, hippie things were important connectors to both the global counterculture (via symbolic alignment of exterior markers) and the world of late socialism, whose weaknesses hippies used to their advantage. At the same time hippies started to spin around things an elaborate ideology, which as a fashion survived their own existence.

Ritualization

The last chapter in the chronological part of the book is devoted to the developments taking place in the hippie movement from the mid-1970s onwards. The sistema intensified through the introduction of a number of rituals and commemorative practices which celebrated its history and identity and fostered community. They adopted the American idea of creating so-called Peoples Books, hippie photo albums, and introduced a kind of hippie calendar celebrating the beginning and end of the travel season. Most importantly, they codified their love for travel into certain hippie routes and established a long-lasting summer camp. Despite severe repressions in the 1980s, the hippie sistema was thus well equipped to survive until the very end of the Soviet Union itself.

Introduction

Hippies in the late Soviet Union appeared to many like creatures from a different star. Yet, a closer look reveals that the history of this movement has both short- and long-term precedents, which range from early revolutionary ideals to the generation of beatniks and Beatles fans, who were only slightly older than the wave of hippie youngsters that appeared in the late 1960s all across the Soviet Union. The introduction also situates the topic of Soviet hippies both within the history of the global hippie movement as well as in the context of late Soviet life and reality. A separate discussion is devoted to the methodology of oral history and the role of the subjective authorial voice. The introduction concludes with the overall argument of the book that the worlds of hippies and late socialism were not incompatible but in a bizarre way a good fit to each other that shaped the character of both.

Kaif

The elusive feeling of kaif was at the heart of the hippie experience—much more than ideology or belief. Kaif was borrowed from the Arabic term keif, which denotes the pleasurable state of mind that is granted to rightful Muslims in paradise. The term kaif meant altering one’s state of mind and entering a new world. Kaif was first and foremost a state of being high—even though not all hippies achieved this high through drugs, but lost themselves in music, sex, spirituality, or simply community. The sistema was all about kaif and it was masterful in creating the conditions in which kaif was experienced. This chapter will look at various routes to how kaif was achieved and what achieving kaif meant for hippie identity and their relationship to the Soviet habitat in which they lived.

Ideology

This chapter looks in depth into the Soviet hippie belief system, while, at the same time, noting the absence of a unified ideology, whose very existence hippies rejected for themselves. It begins with an exploration of the indebtedness of hippie beliefs to the rituals and practices of official Soviet youth culture, highlighting both similarities and differences to Western hippie thought. It then proceeds to discuss common hippie tropes such as freedom, love, peace, and generational conflict with reference to the Soviet case, concluding that there was a lot of ideological overlap between the fundamental messages of communist socialization and the global hippie creed, which indeed had its very roots in the same left-wing, utopian thinking as early Soviet revolutionary ideas. While this ‘boomerang’ effect of radical, communitarian thinking unsettled the Soviet authorities, it also meant that Soviet hippies remained true to their socialist upbringing and world view shaped by late socialism in the very rebellion they staged against the system.

Madness

In this chapter the complex relationship between hippies, the state, and the trope of madness is discussed. Hippies often feigned mental illness in order to escape army service—an action that was facilitated by the Soviet state’s usage of schizophrenia as a diagnosis for dissidents and other nonconformists. Excused from the army and armed with an official document certifying their ‘craziness’ hippies felt free from many of the demands of Soviet life and society. At the same time, the state used psychiatry to lock away unwanted social elements such as hippies, severely curtailing their general freedom, sometimes for years. The battlefield of insanity was hence an interface at which Soviet hippies and state competed for discursive and real power.

Maturity

This chapter concentrates on the post-demonstration history of the Soviet hippie sistema. While at first Soviet hippies seemed to be in crisis, from the mid-1970s a new generation rejuvenated the movement and created the so-called ‘second sistema’. The post-demonstration hippie movement was fewer in numbers, but more resilient, since its members were more committed to the cause, ready to sacrifice jobs, education, and social acceptance in order to live a life they experienced as freer and more colourful than that of their peers. From time to time the underground culture of the hippies demonstrated their cultural and revolutionary potential when their causes inspired resistance such as in the case of the 1976 exhibitions of nonconformist artists or in the mass upheavals in Kaunas after the self-immolation of Romas Kalanta in 1972 or in Leningrad in 1978 when authorities promised, but did not deliver, a rock concert featuring famous acts from the West.

Gerla

This chapter is both a discussion of the specific experience of Soviet hippie women and a reflection of my role as a female and Western interviewer vis-à-vis questions relating to Soviet feminism and emancipation. It begins with a female-centred history of Soviet hippie history and proceeds to discuss female narratives as revealing a different picture of hippiedom than male narratives. The chapter continues with a discussion of the physical and ideological difficulty of ageing for Soviet hippie women, who, more than their male counterparts, were forced to decide for or against a countercultural lifestyle, when children appeared. Their earlier withdrawal and higher connectedness to the mainstream diminished their place in hippie collective memory. It concludes with an evaluation of the absence of second wave feminism in the Soviet hippie scene and the difficulty of translating Western expectations of women’s emancipation into a Soviet context.

Epilogue

The Epilogue reviews the volume’s main points, outlining how both hippies and the Soviet system changed, and with an outlook to the contemporary world. It concludes with a declaration of the author as an active protagonist in the process of making and writing history.