Flowers Through Concrete: Explorations in Soviet Hippieland

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.


Author: Juliane Fürst
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 05/04/2021
Pages: 496
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.95lbs
Size: 9.30h x 5.90w x 1.40d
ISBN: 9780198788324

About the Author

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).