Hippie Movement In The 1960s

Originating from 1960s, hippies, as a counterculture countering official ideologies and calling for freedom and peace, spread widely in North America and Western Europe, then also went to the communist East. For example, in early 1970s, some Ukrainian young hippies started to form their own organizations, which later enlarged the scales. Although continued to use western slogans “make love, not war”, unlike their western counterparts, Soviet Hippies especially utilized the subculture as a way to repulse Soviet regime. Some historians like Juliane Fürst (Transnational Histories 236) further argues, besides idealogical interpretation, Soviet hippies movement could also be analyzed as an apolitical life style, which differentiated from and opposed

Emerging around 1967/68, notably in Moscow and larger cities in Baltic States, the hippies community rapidly grew in strength (“Love, Peace” 569). In spite of the communist suppression and keeping underground situation, the group in Moscow by the late 1960s had increased to include several hundred, or even a thousand members, who made Maiakosvkaia Square and Pschodrom, a courtyard of the Moscow’s Lomonosov University, as their regular rendezvouses (Transnational Histories 247), as the role of Berkeley and Woodstock playing in the American hippies community. After 1985, with the process of perestroika initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev, the underground community was drawn into greater public

The need of disengaging themselves from the others, i.e. the mainstream and the normal, in the description of a Irkutsk hippie, is crucial in the process of getting approved by the community: “the main thing was— the non-acceptance of Soviet life… If you dress differently, it means you are one of ours. If you curse Soviet power— you are one of ours” (“Love, Peace” 585). Their apparent resistance to the Soviet propaganda drew attention from the party authorities, who attempted to suppress the counter culture by arresting and interrogating the participants and condemning them to be “the parasites on the Soviet system” for having no jobs (“Where Did” 635). For instance, in merely a period of six months in 1972, Komsomol activists and police organized more than one hundred raids against hippies (Zhuk 7). The marginalization and alienation of the subcultural group through stereotypes, however, met the requirements of the group and further hardened them together into an entity, which plays an indirect but fundamental role in subvert the