Socialist Flower Power: Soviet Hippie Culture

Хиппи (Khippi) The hippie movement was the first truly global youth movement, yet when it began the hippies of San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York couldn’t have known how far their style and creed would spread. Indeed, when the San Francisco Diggers staged a funeral for the hippie movement in 1969, hippies across the world were only just getting into the swing of things. In Moscow, the summer of 1969 was seminal for the band of khippi that had started to assemble at a few central public places and in the apartments and country houses of their mostly privileged parents. It was then that Moscow hippies discovered that there were many of them and that they shared more than a desire for long hair and a taste for rock-and-roll and jeans. These young people embraced love and peace and rejected the socialist ideology of their parents, just as their Western peers felt alienated by their parents’ bourgeois outlook and their country’s capitalism.

Hippies had started to appear, independent of each other, in all the major Soviet towns.Youngsters painted flowers on their cheeks in Riga, invented hippie symbols in Sevastopol, assembled on the main square of Magadan, in a cemetery in Lviv, opposite the Communist Party headquarters in Kaunas, and by the Finland Station in Leningrad.

They idolized the flower children of Haight-Ashbury, yet their main source of information about them came from the Soviet press. Soviet media initially paid a great deal of attention to the new anti-capitalist, collectivist-minded phenomenon, covering it with sympathetic, almost wistful articles such as one in the newspaper Around the World called “Travels to the Hippieland,” which was read by thousands of budding A 1