SEER, 99, 4, OCTOBER 2021 788 attempt to help consumers creatively negotiate the food shortages that plagued the economy. By contrast, the widespread practice of sharing recipes acknowledged the deficiencies of the planned economy and the significant amount of time involved in procuring food. The shared recipes also served other important purposes. They enabled women to participate actively in public life through their exchange and constituted ‘a shared body of culture’ (p. 53) that ensured the continuation and at times the renewal of culinary traditions. The recipes also enabled a certain freedom that allowed women not only to choose what to prepare for a meal, but importantly served as an outlet for individual expression. The scrapbooks reflected a woman’s personal taste, and often her thoughts, as evidenced by the numerous marginal notes. The kitchen itself became a ‘space of autonomy’ (p. 130) where women were able to indulge in sensory and intellectual pleasures not otherwise readily available. Shkodrova asserts that contrary to the official rhetoric, cooking for many women came to be seen as a privilege. In questioning whether the sharing of recipes constituted actual defiance, or at the very least resistance, she untangles the complex relationships between the individual and the various manifestations of officialdom. Her belief that the women’s behaviour in compiling the scrapbooks is ultimately subversive runs counter to current trends in post-Soviet scholarship, and at times she is too defensive in arguing her ultimately compelling case. The power of her argument is further somewhat diminished by the publisher’s lack of copyediting, which results in distracting sentence structures and patterns of punctuation that stray from standard conventions. Nevertheless, the book’s defence of homegrown recipe collections and their importance as material evidence of Bulgaria’s cultural heritage is both cogent and indisputable. Williams College Darra Goldstein Fürst, Juliane. Flowers Through Concrete: Explorations in Soviet Hippieland. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2021. xvii + 477 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Glossary. Bibliography. Index. £65.00. This book has been a long time in the making and it has certainly been worth the wait. Juliane Fürst’s earlier study of Stalin’s Last Generation (Oxford, 2010) examined the lives of Soviet youth in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Flowers Through Concrete shifts the story to examine the contributions of hippies to ‘late socialism’ in the Soviet Union. At the beginning of the twenty-first century former Soviet hippies began to detail their own experiential history in REVIEWS 789 various publications, online forums and unpublished documents. Fürst’s book is built in part on the public revelation and a careful analysis of these outputs, and it also has the added strength that she spent many years tracking down and interviewing those who played key roles in the various hippie sistema, those with minor bit parts in the movements and the relatives of deceased hippies who have carefully preserved personal artefacts and memorabilia. The book is divided into two parts. The first section traces the evolution of the Soviet hippie movements — origins, consolidation, maturity, ritualization — from the late 1960s through to its demise in the 1980s. This section traces the Soviet Union-wide geographical reach of hippie self-identity and communities, important dates in their calendar (1 June and 5 December) and meeting sites (such as the annual get-togethers in Tsaritsyno and Gauia). It also, of course, outlines the social origins of those who chose to drop out of Soviet society in this way. Like their middle-class counterparts in the West, many of these were young people from well-to-do privileged backgrounds, whose parents were sometimes local dignitaries or had nomenklatura connections that secured a swift exit from police detention following arrest. They sometimes had independent access to apartments and spaces where they could meet up and a few seemingly had access to financial resources that delayed their need to find paid employment. The second section takes a thematic approach to examining ‘hippieland’. Chapters focus on ideology (freedom from Soviet reality, love, peace and childlike innocence), kaif (the mind altering ‘highs’ provided by drugs and alcohol, music and the spirit of community belonging), materiality (jeans and long hair, the key external...
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Nov 10, 2021
Agung Yatiningrum + 1
Open Access
