Soviet hippies: protest generated by the system
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Two books about Soviet hippies, published almost simultaneously by the New Literary Review publishing house, comprehensively explore the topic. Juliane Fürst’s study “Flowers that broke through the asphalt” concentrates on the initial romantic phase of the movement (late 1960s – early 1970s), but does not reach the era of the Arbat, “Gogol” and the Umka sessions that is closer to us; Vitaly Zyuzin’s memoir “Hippies in the USSR” partly closes this gap. Furst is talking about almost legendary personalities from whom there is no reliable evidence left – “everyone has disappeared, and there are no coordinates of anyone,” Zyuzin keeps flashing familiar names, sometimes with a postscript, for example, “in the future, one of the founders of Alfa Bank ” Furst looks at the “System” from the outside, Zyuzin shows it from the inside.
My conscious experience would also be enough to add a few optional notes to this compendium – trips to Optina Pustyn, concerts in the basements at Kurskaya and Sportivnaya, Zabriskie Rider magazine; I still remember what khairatnik and ksivnik are and what a typical “flat” smells like. However, already in the early 1990s, my peers were more likely to leave the System than to fit into it. Those who went into this dubious, sloppy world were looked at as if they had lost their way (I suspect that the hippies of that time looked at us the same way), and the System itself seemed like a faint echo of its own glorious past – “there is so little left for us from these fabulous times ” It is all the more surprising that the hippie tradition retains the same shimmering status in 2024 – if not the spirit and skeleton, then at least the traditions and external attributes are still alive: you can verify this by going to one of the capital’s wine bars, where students gather humanities faculties, or being at the annual celebration on Children’s Day in Tsaritsyno. The patient is not exactly in full bloom, but rather alive and has remained so for more than 50 years, having managed to attract zoomers, boomers, and completely prehistoric species into his orbit. Apparently, this is the longest-lived informal movement in the history of Russia, is it a joke – what kind of impulse was it that allows this star to maintain its radiation and not fade away forever?
Since the time of the program “The Twelfth Floor” and the film “Is It Easy to Be Young?” It is generally accepted that the emergence of “informals” is a natural reaction to the hypocrisy and falsehood of the Soviet system, something like a nonviolent resistance movement, with Iroquois and hair instead of leaflets and Molotov cocktails. Agreeing with this thesis, Juliane Fürst still tries to show that everything is not so simple: breaking out of the framework of the Soviet system, hippies are with it in a strange symbiosis (the very fact that this fundamentally anti-system movement takes the name “System” for itself also seems not random). The first “center” hippies are almost entirely children of the Soviet nomenklatura: in order to protest against a well-fed and boring life, it is necessary, at a minimum, for this life to become well-fed and boring.
Late-Soviet society seems to be specially creating niches for those who are not ready to fit into it completely – all these gatehouses, stokers and janitors’ rooms, empty parental dachas, workshops of semi-legal artists and cheap cafes. Why, even the appearance of local hippieism owes much to the official Soviet media: many of Furst’s interlocutors admit that they began to grow their hair after reading Genrikh Borovik’s article “Walking to the Country of Hippland” in the magazine “Around the World” for 1968. The Soviet system, unnoticed by itself, creates the soil on which flower children will grow, and then mercilessly weeds it: all kinds of patrols are chasing hippies, they are tied up, screwed, expelled from the institute and forcibly cut their hair, they are ridiculed in every issue of the Krokodil magazine. , they are removed from trains, imprisoned for parasitism and sent to mental hospitals. Soviet hippies have existed for decades in the status of outcasts and scum – and at the same time they become for the larger Soviet system something like a collective unconscious: this is what society could look like if it adopted communist values not for show or for its own benefit, but to the point of complete destruction seriously. One of the Komsomol functionaries in Fürst’s book complains: they say, we have been trying for years to instill a sense of collectivism among young people, and now we have finally succeeded.
The heroes of Zyuzin’s memoirs – Soviet hippies of the 1980s – do not particularly notice the big Soviet system: even running away from Komsomol patrols in their Universe is not at all painful or humiliating, it is rather a fun adventure. The heroes of Fürst’s book, who lived a decade earlier, even try to lend a hand to this system: the legendary Moscow hippie Yura Solntse decides to organize a demonstration against the war in Vietnam and, in good faith, goes to get permission from the Moscow Soviet. All the demonstrators, of course, will be caught before the first hippie has time to leave the fence of the journalism department on Mokhovaya. System-1 is not so alien to the ideological principles of System-2; it could have assimilated it, dissolved it in itself – but that was not the case. Gatherings of hippies are not coordinated with their superior comrades and are not organized according to instructions from the regional committee, and this is enough for System-1 to crush them with all possible fury, without noticing their ideological kinship. “Ovchinnikov gave a performance in the Simferopol cafe “Ogonyok”, where hippies often visited: he sat down at the table and put a sign in front of him “I am a communist.” He was immediately arrested and sent to a psychiatric hospital.”
There is, however, another reason – the reliable class instinct. For an ordinary official and security officer, hippies are not idealists who have risen above all worldly things, but a snickering elite who is going crazy with fat. They somehow managed to arrange that they didn’t have to get up at first light to the machine or carry out combat duty in a distant garrison – and it’s infuriating. To be a hippie in the USSR means to agree to the most radical renunciation of a career, social status, or any kind of well-being. Once I was at an exhibition about the 1960s at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, in the last room they showed a video clip where current ministers, entrepreneurs and IT moguls told how the ideals of hippie youth were embodied in their lives; in the annals of Soviet hippies at this stage of their biography, death from an overdose or, at best, a quiet survival in unknown poverty is more common.
As for ideology: on this basis, hippies do not even fit into the Soviet world, but simply into the adult world. They cannot formulate their principles and answer the question: what is your political credo? Their ideology is embodied in aesthetics and practice: the symbol of faith for them is not a manifesto with an understandable number of points (despite the fact that writing manifestos is also a favorite pastime of hippies), but the style of pants and that feeling of freedom that covers you when you hitchhike. Artemy Troitsky (recognized as a foreign agent in the Russian Federation) recalls how the “Moscow Hendrix” guitarist Igor Degtyaryuk snorted when he saw his skinny jeans: “Are you for war?”
Hippies are, first of all, an emotional community: what is passed on from generation to generation is not a code of rules, but a dream, pity, melancholy, or, if you look from the point of view of the “adult world,” a reluctance to grow up – according to the patterns prescribed in society. Contrary to perestroika narratives, the hippies did not want to defeat anyone and were not in the strict sense a “protest movement”: as Zyuzin writes, “the hippie was already a protest, even if he did not utter a single sound and did not go out to any demonstrations. What he was for was clearer than clear – love, peace, freedom, joy, happiness.”
To dream of a world where everyone will love each other and every day will become a holiday can be considered a sign of political or even human immaturity, but it is natural for a person, and this dream lives somewhere in the heart of the world, no matter how hard you drive it under the asphalt . Juliane Fürst’s book has an incredibly touching ending – in which the researcher puts down his analytical microscope and admits that he can no longer look at his heroes with all the necessary detachment: “Having talked with a large number of people who suffered for their faith, but did not break, I was filled with deep respect for the power of simplicity of this worldview. At some point, I was forced to admit that love and peace contain the answers to all questions – both on a personal and on a global level.”
By the end of the 1970s, long hair and flared jeans, which once could easily get you 15 days, became mainstream even in the USSR. Just as, somewhat later, rock festivals, sharing and co-living spaces, vegan cafes and books on transcendental meditation became commonplace. People who believe in their dream too seriously run the risk of falling out of society, becoming an alcoholic and going astray, but the dream does not die. Flowers break through the asphalt – and even if they are destined to wither and disappear, they leave a mark.
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