Public Lecture by Dr. Juliane Fürst: All you need is Love

Public Lecture by Dr. Juliane Fürst (University of Bristol)
"All you need is Love: How the Soviet Hippies lived through, with and despite Stagnation"

This paper is going to explore the life and world of the Soviet hippie movement and in particular the genesis and trajectory of its informal network dubbed sistema. It is going to explore how and why the sistema came about in the conditions of Brezhnev’s stagnation and repressive measures and how it learned to live and adapt to the condition of late socialism. It will be argued that, while the existence of a Soviet hippie movement per se belies our common perception of what it meant to live during zastoi, the relationship between the sistema and stagnation is a more complicated one and more akin to a symbiosis, in which both sides survive because of the existence of the other. 

Bio Note
Juliane Fürst is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Bristol. She is the author of Stalin’s Last Generation: Soviet Post-War Youth and the Emergence of Late Socialism and of numerous articles on Soviet youth, subcultures and non-conformists. She is currently completing a book project on the history of the Soviet hippies and also curating an exhibition on the topic to be shown at the Wende Museum, LA.

This event is part of the Tallinn Summer School course Late Socialism (1956-85): The Forgotten Years between Stalinism and Perestroika