Flowers Through Concrete

Explorations in Soviet Hippieland

Juliane Fürst

The first comprehensive history and interpretation of the hippie movement in the Soviet Union
A rare insight into the working of the Soviet underground and an important contribution to our knowledge of late socialism
Based on over a hundred interviews with contemporary sources and recently declassified KGB and party documents

Flowers Through Concrete

Explorations in Soviet Hippieland

Juliane Fürst

Description

Flowers through Concrete: Explorations in Soviet Hippieland takes the reader on a journey into the lives and thoughts of Soviet hippies. In the face of disapproval and repression, they created a version of Western counterculture, skillfully adapting to, manipulating, and shaping their late socialist environment. Flowers through Concrete takes its readers into the underground hippieland and beyond, situating the world of hippies firmly in late Soviet reality and offering both an unusual history of the last Soviet decades as well as a case study of transnational youth culture and East-West globalization.

Flowers through Concrete is based on over a hundred interviews, declassified documents, and private archives hidden for many decades. It tells the almost forgotten story of how hippie communities sprang up across the Soviet Union in the late-60s, often under the tutelage of the rebellious offspring of privileged households at the heart of the Soviet establishment. It charts how these communities linked up to create an impressive network with elaborate customs and rituals, ensuring its survival for more than two decades.

Flowers through Concrete recounts not only a compelling story of survival against the odds - hippies who were harassed by police, shorn of their hair by civilian guards, and confined in psychiatric hospitals by doctors who believed non-conformism was a symptom of schizophrenia - but also advances a surprising argument. It suggests that the land of Soviet hippies and the world of late socialism were not entirely incompatible, but in fact meshed surprisingly well. Ultimately, it was not the KGB but the arrival of capitalism in the 1990s that ended the Soviet hippie sistema.

Flowers Through Concrete

Explorations in Soviet Hippieland

Juliane Fürst

Flowers Through Concrete

Explorations in Soviet Hippieland

Juliane Fürst

Author Information

Juliane Fürst, Head of Department of Communism and Society, Leibniz Centre of Contemporary History (ZZF), Potsdam

Juliane Fürst co-heads the Department of Communism and Society at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History (ZZF) in Potsdam. She is the author of Stalin's Last Generation: Soviet Post-War Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialism (2010) and co-editor of the Cambridge History of Communism (2017) and Dropping out of Socialism: Alternative Cultures and Lifestyles in the Soviet Bloc (2016).

Flowers Through Concrete

Explorations in Soviet Hippieland

Juliane Fürst

Reviews and Awards

"Fürst's exhaustive history is basedon 135 interviews with surviving hippies, as well as memoirs and personal archives. It is filled with colorful characters; documents their travels, gatherings, and spiritual quests; and boastsan amazing collection of photos." -- Maria Lipman

"In Flowers Through the Concrete Julianne Fürst has provided us with nothing less than an alternative history of the late Soviet Union. This in itself is a tremendous achievement." -- Alexandra Oberländer

"In her meticulously researched book, Juliane Furst offers a superb analysis of this unexpected community of people who were differently Soviet and alternatively socialist. This is a game-changing book in the studies of Soviet socialism. Personal, riveting, and illuminating, Flowers through Concrete unpacks the complexity of late Soviet culture, powerfully shattering well-engrained stereotypes and simplified assumptions about Soviet people and their lives. The Soviet hippies never wrote their own history; Juliane Furst did an excellent job on their behalf." -- Professor Serguei Oushakine, Princeton University

"Beneath its façade of gray conformity, late Soviet socialism turns out to have been a prodigious incubator of countercultures. Juliane Furst is the ideal guide to what she calls "nonaligned behaviors," taking readers on a fascinating journey into the little-known world of Soviet hippies. Full of unexpected characters and insights, this wide-ranging, deeply researched, and beautifully illustrated book opens up new terrain in Soviet history and the global history of youth movements." -- Professor Benjamin Nathans, University of Pennsylvania

"In this exquisitely written and engagingly visual book, Julianne Furst opens to us the myriad ways in which self-identified hippies, like "unruly children," exasperated, repudiated, and critiqued late Soviet culture while relying upon and subtly engaging its substance. From music to madness to materiality, Fürst brings Soviet hippies to life within the flux and paradox of the last decades of the USSR. Her interpretation of her 134 interviews, sensitively gathered and delicately inferred, show the illuminating possibilities of oral history in the hands of a sympathetic and skilled historian. Encompassing trans-Soviet as well as transnational dimensions, the book is, as the author says, "a really good story" told with self-reflexivity and brilliance." -- Professor Marsha Siefert, Central European University

"Juliane Furst's Flowers through Concrete grapples with the transnational quality of the Soviet hippy movement within the closed borders of the USSR. Fürst does not assume that hippies were voting with their personal life choices either for or against socialism. Rather she shows how hippies' political ideas hardened over time as they became objects of state surveillance, police and medical actions. This book helps us re-think late Soviet culture in fascinating ways." -- Professor Kate Brown, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

"This is a highly imaginative and wonderfully original study of what happened when flower power collided with Brezhnev-era officialdom, exploring how hippies carved out a space of freedom that many would not have imagined possible, given the repressive and ideological power of the party-state." -- Professor Stephen Smith, University of Oxford