Showcasing Socialist Flower Power: The World of Soviet Hippies

Soviet hippies may seem to many a paradox in terms. Very few people, even in the Soviet Union itself, knew that there was a thriving hippie community. The hippie 'sistema' was located in various cities throughout the Soviet empire from 1967 to the very end of the Soviet Union in 1991. Extensive research made possible by the AHRC grant 'Dropping out of Socialism' has made first inroads into this topic and is going to be presented in the monograph 'Flowers Through Concrete' by the PI of this project, forthcoming with OUP in 2017. An unexpected corollary of the research has been the collaboration between the PI Juliane Fürst and the Wende Museum in LA, which offered a home to many of the invaluable and highly eccentric hippie archives unearthed in the course of research. The Wende is now sheltering, restoring and making accessible over 3000 artifacts relating to the Soviet hippie culture.

This grant proposes to extend this collaboration in order to facilitate an extensive exhibition on the history of the Soviet hippie movement in June 2017, commemorating its 50th anniversary. It proposes not only to showcase the many interesting items in the possession of the Wende Museum, but also to provoke discussion about the nature and universality of countercultures, the working of dictatorial regimes and the parallels and differences between East and West. It aims to engage new audiences by exhibiting unique and new material. At the same time resonates with California audiences, because of its evocation of the American sixties. Many visitors are likely to have themselves a countercultural past.

The museum will also host a study day, in which participants of the Soviet hippie movement will meet with audiences and representatives of local countercultures. The programme of workshops, accompanying the exhibition is tailored to younger people with the aim to highlighting continuity and change, e.g. showing not only that all generations knew rebels, outsiders and countercultures, but also that these marginals left significant impact on the mainstream. A digital archive, sponsored by the original grant 'Dropping out' will ensure continued access to exhibition materials for interested audiences.

Finally, the extensive and multi-level collaboration between the Wende Museum and Dr. Juliane Fürst will provide a blueprint for future collaborations between the museum and academics, highlighting how research, archiving and exhibition activities can fruitfully engage with and further each other. The exhibition highlights not only the need to preserve archives' 'on the margin' of societies, but also the value that can be added to academic research by using historical sources in an innovative, accessible and visible manner.

This is an application for follow-on funding and hence is in its entirety geared towards impact. Specifically the proposal aims to have impact in the following areas:

1. To further and showcase an exceptional collaboration between academia and museum; to establish a blueprint for future collaboration between the museum and scholars.

One of the unexpected and important outcomes of the AHRC grant 'Dropping out of Socialism' was the extremely fruitful collaboration between the PI Dr. Juliane Fürst and the Wende Museum in LA. That collaboration resulted in the collection of over 3000 items of Soviet hippie memorabilia and will culminate in a large exhibition and digital archive of the materials. The Wende is looking to build on this experience and use it as a blueprint for further collaborations between the museum and academia. We also believe that our experience is worth disseminating to a larger academic and museum audience, since it helped the Wende Museum to widen its reach and the PI to engage with her material in a more visual way more accessible to non-academics. This has broadened the horizons of both partners.

2. To tell and showcase the history of an important countercultural movement in Eastern Europe to a wider public, engaging new audiences and exploring new avenues of dissemination.

At the heart of the project is the exhibition 'Socialist Flower Power'. The exhibition both takes the museum into new territory of counterculture and late Soviet history and allows the PI to disseminate knowledge in a way that is not geared towards academic audiences. The material of the exhibition, while interesting in itself, is also a strong reminder that Russia - now and then - is not a homogenous, monolithic society. This has particular relevance in today times of renewed tension.

3. To explore new ways of disseminating historical narratives.

Both the museum and the PI aim to tell the tale of the Soviet hippies through a variety of media (especially sound and visual sources), integrating a mixture of biographical and thematic approaches and hence to break down the barrier between personal experience and historical narrative.

4. To prepare the collection of hippie archives for future use by scholars and public; to ready the exhibition for transit to London, and other potentially interested exhibition sites.

Part of the preparation of the exhibition is the cataloguing and filing of materials in a way that makes it easily accessible for future use both as an exhibition and as an object of research by academics and the interested public. The planned workshops in particular are designed to attract young people to the collection and suggest ways in which their own experiences of alienation and marginalization have parallels in other historical moments.