Join us for a discussion by Dr. Juliane Fürst, Senior Lecturer at the University of Bristol. Fürst will speak on "Love, Peace and Developed Socialism: A Short Course in the History of the Soviet Hippie Movement and its Sistema."
The lecture will trace the history of a little known late Soviet phenomenon: the buoyant Soviet hippie movement and its informal network, which they dubbed ‘Sistema’. Based on hundreds of interviews the origins, rise, metamorphoses and decline of the Soviet hippies will be chartered, starting from their beginnings in Moscow’s privileged youth to their dissolution in the heydays of Perestroika when they seemed to merge back into a mainstream that had more become like them than they ever imagined. In the meantime the hippies had set up an impressive parallel life complete with hippie communes, summer camps, a specific slang, public and clandestine meeting places, not to mention the Soviet Union’s best information network. Soviet hippies emerge as more than just an interesting anecdote to the last decades of the Soviet Union: Their lives were in constant dialogue with late Soviet reality, shaping it as much as reflecting it. Rather than being outside late Soviet life, they contributed to what gave late socialism its distinctive flavor. Yet they also needed late socialism, relying on its specific economic and social set-up to function as long and as successfully as they did.
