The Secrets of Two Alternatives: Untold Pages from the History of the Soviet Hippie Samizdat of the late 1970s - early 1980s

Abstract

The article examines two samizdat publications created in the Soviet hippies’ milieu of the 1970s, both titled Alternative. One of them survived in two copies and contained articles about Western youth, mostly reprinted from the official Soviet press. The author was V. Teplyshev, a Soviet hippie and member of the underground ecumenical community. We know about the second book only from mentions in interviews and memoirs of hippie community members. It was a Russian translation of a book on American hippie communes published in the United States in 1970. Both collections depicted Western hippies as a religious and social movement aimed at radical societal changes through a spiritual revolution, led by countercultural youth. The emergence of these books is closely linked to the communitarian aspirations of hippies, and their attempts to establish communes as an alternative social form to Soviet collectivism. While the history of the emergence and dissemination of these books contains many unanswered questions, this study provides insights into the political imagination of Soviet hippies in the late 1970s and early 1980s.