LAUSR

produced fertile ground for rebellion against behavioral strictures. More broadly, Fürst points out that hippies were emblematic of people’s growing disillusionment in the late Soviet period. While most Soviet hippies started by listening to the Beatles and reading about American hippies, their lives and social networks soon evolved in response to the repressive habitat in which they resided. Following mass arrests during a 1971 demonstration in Moscow, the hippie movement was no longer populated by university students but rather by hardcore hippies. These “professional hippies,” as Fürst calls them, were “people who were prepared to sacrifice the advantages of a stable Soviet life for their own little corners of freedom and fun” (180). They took menial jobs, experimented with drugs, and traveled to hippie havens in other Soviet republics. Some features of Soviet life, such as guaranteed employment and the low cost of food, actually facilitated hippies’ lifestyles in many ways. On the surface, Soviet hippies looked much like their counterparts in the west. But Fürst argues that the very rigidity of the Soviet system ensured a longevity to the Soviet hippie community that was impossible to sustain in the liberal west. Indeed, Fürst concludes that hippies and the Soviet establishment had a hostile yet symbiotic relationship. She writes: “After the regime decided in the early 1970s to persecute the domestic hippie community, the two remained in a destructive, but ultimately stable embrace” (182). While counterintuitive, her conclusion is proven by the fact that Soviet hippiedom’s demise was precipitated not by KGB repression but rather by its disappearance, and the arrival of capitalism in the 1990s. A counterculture based on rebellion against the Soviet system could not continue without its foil. Fürst’s book represents an impressive scholarly accomplishment. The oral history interviews she conducted allow her both to analyze and to preserve hippies’ life stories, which otherwise might have been lost. Moreover, her research illustrates the unconventionality of hippie counterculture that existed beneath the façade of a tightly controlled Soviet society. While some may object that Fürst goes too far by characterizing late Soviet socialism as “in effect a pluralistic society” (11), her work clearly demonstrates that this society was much more diverse than is generally assumed. In addition, one cannot help but admire the hippies Fürst describes, given that—in the face of enormous repression—they spurned social conformity to pursue their own lifestyles and their own freedom. Fürst celebrates them as “beacons of ‘otherness’— an exciting, colourful, engaging, rebellious, fun-loving, individual, tolerant, curious, creative otherness” (442). As the metaphor in the book’s title indicates, Soviet hippies were like flowers that somehow pushed through cracks in the Soviet concrete and bloomed.