Juliane Fürst

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.

Explorations in Soviet Hippieland

Flowers Through Concrete

The late Stalinist period, long neglected by researchers more interested in the high-profile events of the 1930s, has recently become the focus of much new research by people keen to understand the enormous impact of the war on Soviet society and to understand Soviet life under 'mature socialism'. Written by top scholars from high profile universities, this impressive work brings together much new, cutting edge research on a wide range of aspects of late Stalinist society. Filling a gap in the literature, it focuses above all on the experience of the Soviet people and their interaction with ideology, state policy and national and international politics.

Society Between Reconstruction and Reinvention

Late Stalinist Russia

Mark Selden

Silvio Pons

The third volume of The Cambridge History of Communism spans the period from the 1960s to the present, documenting the last two decades of the global Cold War and the collapse of Soviet socialism. An international team of scholars analyze the rise of China as a global power continuing to proclaim its Maoist allegiance, and the transformation of the geopolitics and political economy of Cold War conflict in an era of increasing economic interpenetration. Beneath the surface, profound political, social, economic and cultural changes were occurring in the socialist and former socialist countries, resulting in the collapse and transformations of the existing socialist order and the changing parameters of world Marxism. This volume draws on innovative research to bring together history from above and below, including social, cultural, gender, and transnational history to transcend the old separation between Communist studies and the broader field of contemporary history.

The Cambridge History of Communism

'Stalin's last generation' was the last generation to come of age under Stalin, yet it was also the first generation to be socialized in the post-war period. Its young members grew up in a world that still carried many of the hallmarks of the Soviet Union's revolutionary period, yet their surroundings already showed the first signs of decay, stagnation, and disintegration. Stalin's last generation still knew how to speak 'Bolshevik', still believed in the power of Soviet heroes and still wished to construct socialism, yet they also liked to dance and dress in Western styles, they knew how to evade boring lectures and lessons in Marxism-Leninism, and they were keen to forge identities that were more individual than those offered by the state. In this book, Juliane Fürst creates a detailed picture of late Stalinist youth and youth culture, looking at young people from a variety of perspectives: as children of the war, as recipients and creators of propaganda, as perpetrators of crime, as representatives of fledgling subcultures, as believers, as critics, and as drop-outs. In the process, she illuminates not only the complex relationship between the Soviet state and its youth, but also provides a new interpretative framework for understanding late Stalinism - the impact of which on Soviet society's subsequent development has hitherto been underestimated, including its role in the ultimate demise of the USSR.

Soviet Post-War Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialism

Stalin's Last Generation

Josie McLellan

This multidisciplinary collection of essays examines alternative subcultures in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union during the era of late socialism. The contributors analyze how these marginal communities rejected mainstream socialist culture, sought ideological and physical space from the state, and contributed to the demise of the USSR.

Juliane Fürst

About

Books

Join the club