Hippies in the Baltic [Volume: 7(1988), pp. 157-176]

Cross Currents 7 (198b)
A Yearbook of Central European Culture
HIPPIES IN THE BALTIC
The Rock-And-Roll Era
Mark Yoffe
It goes without saying that the Latvian, Lithuanian or Estonian hippies
(and they are the ones we are talking about) were anathematized by the
local Soviet officials and there was nothing strange about that. That is
what Soviet officials are for-to forbid and to punish.
What is much stranger is the fact that the same attitude toward the
generation of the '70s has been shared by those who are "good," i.e., the
defenders of free-thinking and democracy. So, for example, A. Solzhenitsyn
in his letter on the creation of an All-Russian Memoir Archive writes that
the newest generation should not bother to send in its reminiscences;
because, in his opinion, that generation has totally adjusted to the Soviet
regime and is mired down in conformity.
No doubt Solzhenitsyn is a representative of the Russian emigration
which has at its disposal a considerable quantity of newspapers and periodicals devoted to the Soviet Union. In any of these publications, however,
there never has been any material on the hippie movement in the Soviet
Union and on the influence of rock music on the interests, desires, aspirations and problems of contemporary Soviet young people.
Somehow from the very beginning (and often through inertia echoing
Soviet critics) it became customary to consider this generation "totally
lost" and for this reason the opinion exists that there is really nothing
to say about it.
But we will try to say a few words about the generation of the '70s
of the Soviet Union and, if not about all of its multimillion masses, then
at least about that part which called itself "hippies."
It is now impossible to say how big that group was in the Soviet Union,
especially because the number of hippies varied from town to town and from
year to year. They were most noticeable in the capitals of the Baltic republics, in Leningrad, in Moscow, in Kiev, in the capitals of the Caucasian
republics and, from time to time, in some other important cities of the
Soviet Union.
Since we will be speaking of the Baltic hippies, we wish to commence
our story with a small digression about the recent history of the Baltic
republics. The most striking characteristic is the lack of a political alliance
among the Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians in the struggle against
Sovietization and Russification. This is a fact, however strange it might
Maija Tabaka, The Jungle [a detail] (1977).
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