Hippies and Soviet Liminality

Abstract

Hippies and Soviet Liminality Alexey Golubev Juliane Fürst, Flowers through Concrete: Explorations in Soviet Hippieland. 496 pp. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. ISBN-13 978-0198788324. $74.00. When working on his now classic The Ritual Process in the latter half of the 1960s, Victor Turner used the nascent hippie movement to provide a contemporary example of communitas, a form of social organization that prioritizes horizontal connections over vertical, spontaneous connections over institutionalized relationships, and the lack of a formal status over power. A communitas, as Turner writes, "breaks in through the interstices of structure, in liminality; at the edges of structure, in marginality; and from beneath structure, in inferiority."1 Communitates cannot exist outside a "bigger" and thoroughly structured society, since they grow from liminal spaces and experiences that all societies need to provide for their rites of passage: as Turner suggests, "men are released from structure to communitas only to return to structure revitalized by their experience of communitas."2 That was definitely the case for the overwhelming majority of American hippies who later fully reintegrated into mainstream society—many of them as academics, progressive politicians, and business people, a trajectory that David Brooks somewhat condescendingly described in his Bobos in Paradise.3 Our understanding of the historical forms, expressions, and experiences of liminality in Soviet society has seen a lot of progress lately—including in works that focus on the only relatively stable period of its history known as late, or [End Page 936] developed, socialism and associated with the three decades between the mid-1960s and mid-1980s. Coming of age in the USSR has received more attention through works by Catriona Kelly, Alla Sal´nikova, and many other scholars.4 In contrast, old age, dying, and death in the Soviet context have been addressed only recently by Alissa Klots, Maria Romashova, Yana Skorobogatov, and Sergei Mokhov.5 Victoria Smolkin's monograph examined the invention of new Soviet rituals, and studies of Soviet everyday life showed how some of these rituals were lived and understood by their participants.6 Soviet liminality as an area of inquiry also has its lacunae, most importantly when it comes to scholarship on what one could call Soviet communitates.7 Juliane Fürst's Flowers through Concrete: Explorations in Soviet Hippieland is, to my knowledge, the first book-length scholarly study of a Soviet communitas. As such, it provides a fascinating and novel perspective on the late socialist period of Soviet history. Fürst starts her history of the Soviet hippie movement by placing it in the historical context of late socialism with its urbanization; involvement in the global circulation of ideas, images, and things; growing diversity of cultural forms; and the inability of the party-state to impose any kind of a strict control over them. Soviet hippies were a curious by-product of what Eleanory Gilburd called "Soviet translation culture," an officially sanctioned agenda to transfer and "domesticate" those elements of Western culture that Soviet authorities and intelligentsia found useful in their effort to enlighten and educate audiences at home.8 Soviet hippies appeared in the wake of sympathetic articles about hippies in America published in no less than Pravda as well as Soviet popular journals in 1967 and 1968, and the privileged youth with its much better access to all things [End Page 937] American played a key role in the early stage of Soviet hippiedom (chapter 1). Yet Fürst shows that they were much more than just a replica of the Western hippie movement. To start with, Soviet hippies emerged in a social and cultural context where the party-state authorities were still very much preoccupied with regulating and controlling leisure time and the activities of their citizens. Seeing how some of them put on conspicuously colored clothes, proclaimed their affinity for Western music, and—most concerning of all—took these new colors and sounds to the Soviet public space, Soviet authorities responded with repressive actions (chapter 2). While the repressive actions were definitely effective in dissuading many individual hippies from the movement, in the grand scale of things it was merely symptomatic treatment, since they failed to address the structural causes prompting new generations...