Flowers Through Asphalt: A Journey into Soviet Hippieland

Juliane Fuerst invites you to embark on a journey into the underground world of Soviet hippies who created a version of Western counterculture in the USSR, adapted to the living conditions of late socialism society. This is not only an exciting story of the formation and survival of hippie communities, which were persecuted by the police and the militia, and placed in psychiatric hospitals by doctors who saw manifestations of nonconformity as symptoms of schizophrenia, but also a tale of how the world of hippies and the world of Soviet everyday life entered into an enforced dialogue, paradoxically blending well with each other. Ultimately, it was not the KGB, but the arrival of capitalism in the 1990s that put an end to ‘Hippieland’ in the Soviet Union. Examining the phenomenon of hippies in the context of transnational youth culture studies and the globalization processes of the 1960s and 1970s, the author shows how hippie communities, located at the very heart of the Soviet establishment, united to create an impressive network (‘System’) with complex customs and rituals that allowed it to exist for more than two decades. The study is based on over a hundred interviews, declassified intelligence documents, and materials from private archives that had long remained inaccessible. Juliane Fuerst is a historian and head of the ‘Communism and Society’ department at the ‘Leibniz Centre’ for contemporary history (Potsdam).