Soviet ‘Flower Children’. Hippies and the Youth Counter-culture in 1970s L’viv

Abstract

This article examines the emergence of the ‘hippie’ movement and responses to it in the western Ukrainian city of L’viv. Hippies in L’viv, like their counterparts in the capitalist West, created alternative social spaces in response to a sense of alienation in the modern industrialized world. Yet this sense of alienation and responses to it significantly differed, due to the postwar transformation of L’viv, efforts by the Communist Party to control all aspects of the public sphere, and national and regional tensions in western Ukraine. As a result, Soviet ‘hippies’, in rebelling against Soviet society, mirrored many of its features, and to an extent they became associated with elements of national and regional resistance in postwar L’viv. Persecution of hippies and negative perceptions of them furthermore reveal official attitudes toward the ‘hippie’ movement and certain assumptions about gender roles and the social order in 1970s Soviet society.