Flowers that Broke the Asphalt: A Journey to Soviet Hippieland
19.99 €
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Flowers that Broke the Asphalt: A Journey to Soviet Hippieland
19.99 €
Juliane Fürst offers a journey into the underground world of Soviet hippies, who created in the USSR a version of the Western counterculture adapted to the conditions of life in the society of the late socialist era. This is not only a fascinating story of the formation and survival of hippie communities, who were persecuted by the police and vigilantes, and placed in psychiatric hospitals by doctors who saw symptoms of schizophrenia in manifestations of nonconformism, but also a story of how the world of hippies and the world of Soviet everyday life entered into a forced dialog, paradoxically blending well with each other. Ultimately, it was not the KGB, but the arrival of capitalism in the 1990s that brought an end to "Hipplandia" in the Soviet Union. Examining the hippie phenomenon in the context of the study of transnational youth culture and globalization processes of the 1960s and 1970s, the author shows how hippie communities at the heart of the Soviet establishment came together to form an impressive network (the "System") with complex customs and rituals that allowed it to survive for more than two decades. The study is based on more than a hundred interviews, declassified documents from intelligence agencies and material from private archives that have long remained inaccessible. Juliane Fürst is a historian and head of the department "Communism and Society" at the Leibniz Center for Contemporary History (Potsdam).
See also:
- All books by the publisher
- All books by the author
- All books in the series Rossica History