Awards

• Winner of Winner, The Svetlana Boym Best Book in Cultural Studies, AATSEEL.

Overview

Flowers through Concrete: Explorations in Soviet Hippieland does what the title promises. It takes readers on a journey into a world few knew existed: the lives and thoughts of Soviet hippies, who in the face of disapproval and repression created a version of Western counterculture, skilfully adapting, manipulating, and shaping it to their late socialist environment. As a quasi-guide into the underground hippieland, readers are situated in the world of hippies firmly in late Soviet reality and are offered an unusual history of the last Soviet decades as well as a case study in the power of transnational youth cultures. Flowers through Concrete recounts not only a compelling story of survival against the odds-hippies 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. It also advances a surprising argument: despite obvious antagonism the land of Soviet hippies and the world of late socialism were not incompatible. Indeed, Soviet hippies and late socialist reality meshed so well that the hostile, yet stable, relationship that emerged was in many ways symbiotic. Ultimately, it was not the KGB but the arrival of capitalism in the 1990s that ended the Soviet hippie sistema.

Full Product Details

9780192866066

Table of Contents

Reviews

In Flowers Through the Concrete Julianne Furst has provided us with nothing less than an alternative history of the late Soviet Union. This in itself is a tremendous achievement. * Alexandra Oberlander * In her meticulously researched book, Juliane Furst offers a superb analysis of this unexpected community of people who were differently Soviet and alternatively socialist. This is a game-changing book in the studies of Soviet socialism. Personal, riveting, and illuminating, Flowers through Concrete unpacks the complexity of late Soviet culture, powerfully shattering well-engrained stereotypes and simplified assumptions about Soviet people and their lives. The Soviet hippies never wrote their own history; Juliane Furst did an excellent job on their behalf. * Professor Serguei Oushakine, Princeton University * Beneath its facade of gray conformity, late Soviet socialism turns out to have been a prodigious incubator of countercultures. Juliane Furst is the ideal guide to what she calls nonaligned behaviors, taking readers on a fascinating journey into the little-known world of Soviet hippies. Full of unexpected characters and insights, this wide-ranging, deeply researched, and beautifully illustrated book opens up new terrain in Soviet history and the global history of youth movements. * Professor Benjamin Nathans, University of Pennsylvania * In this exquisitely written and engagingly visual book, Julianne Furst opens to us the myriad ways in which self-identified hippies, like unruly children, exasperated, repudiated, and critiqued late Soviet culture while relying upon and subtly engaging its substance. From music to madness to materiality, Furst brings Soviet hippies to life within the flux and paradox of the last decades of the USSR. Her interpretation of her 134 interviews, sensitively gathered and delicately inferred, show the illuminating possibilities of oral history in the hands of a sympathetic and skilled historian. Encompassing trans-Soviet as well as transnational dimensions, the book is, as the author says, a really good story told with self-reflexivity and brilliance. * Professor Marsha Siefert, Central European University * Juliane Furst's Flowers through Concrete grapples with the transnational quality of the Soviet hippy movement within the closed borders of the USSR. Furst does not assume that hippies were voting with their personal life choices either for or against socialism. Rather she shows how hippies' political ideas hardened over time as they became objects of state surveillance, police and medical actions. This book helps us re-think late Soviet culture in fascinating ways. * Professor Kate Brown, Massachusetts Institute of Technology * This is a highly imaginative and wonderfully original study of what happened when flower power collided with Brezhnev-era officialdom, exploring how hippies carved out a space of freedom that many would not have imagined possible, given the repressive and ideological power of the party-state * Professor Stephen Smith, University of Oxford *

Author Information

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).

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