Flowers Through Concrete

In the face of disapproval and repression Soviet hippies created a version of Western counterculture, skilfully adapting to, manipulating, and shaping their late socialist environment. Flowers through Concrete explores their lives, thoughts, and political sway.

Juliane Fürst co-heads the Department of Communism and Society at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History (ZZF) in Potsdam. She is the author of Stalin's Last Generation: Soviet Post-War Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialism (2010) and co-editor of the Cambridge History of Communism (2017) and Dropping out of Socialism: Alternative Cultures and Lifestyles in the Soviet Bloc (2016).

Introduction
Part I: Short course in the History of the Soviet Hippie Movement and its Sistema
1: Origins
2: Consolidation
3: Maturity
4: Ritualization
Part II: How Soviet Hippies and Late Socialism Made Each Other
5: Ideology
6: Kaif
7: Materiality
8: Madness
9: Gerla
Epilogue