‘Freedom, Love and Needle’: A Story of Tripping in the Soviet Union

When asked the year of his birth, Azazello, a Soviet hippie and committed psychonaut, responded: ‘I was born on 3 April 1956 – born in the last year before the Cosmic Age’.^[1] By the 1970s, the decade in which Azazello fully embraced the hippie lifestyle, space flight dominated the headlines, but this symbol of progress, freedom and exploration could also inspire more personal voyages of self-discovery. When he drew a syringe as a rocket-ship, blasting ‘into the nebula’, Azazello made it clear that he thought of his drug-use as a voyage of exploration into a world beyond this one.^[2] He experimented with mind-altering substances and went on journeys to worlds that were filled with mystical and fantastic scenes and creatures, but when the drugs wore off he found himself back in a society which seemed grey, repressive, and which tolerated only the exploration of class consciousness.

 

In his astonishing personal archive of notebooks, Azazello sought to capture the wonder of his drug experiences: his fantastical drawings are a window into a fevered, creative, dark and yet sometimes euphoric mind. They are hallucinatory and hypnotic, giving us a deep, direct insight into the experience and meaning of his drug use, hidden inside the world of late socialism. Psychedelic states are by nature ineffable, but artistic expression can point to emotional realities which lie beyond the grasp of words. His notebooks, along with interviews conducted towards the end of his life, allow us to explore what these experiences meant to him and how he tried to carve out a different and unusual life lived against the odds in the repressive Soviet system.

 

These vibrant and often mystical experiences challenge the conventional view of the late Soviet period as one of dull stasis and stagnation, in which people had long since abandoned a belief in the sparkling socialist future and resigned themselves to mouthing the stale words of regime propaganda as the price for living a quiet and relatively comfortable life. Azazello and his fellow hippies did the exact opposite. They chose to be visibly and disconcertingly different. They let their hair grow wild, wore homemade, brightly-coloured clothing, and experimented with mind-altering substances. Together, they sought to trip the light fantastic and dance into new, more vibrant worlds.

 

Such displays of non-conformity inevitably aroused the ire of the Soviet authorities, but they were uncertain how to deal with these social misfits who openly defied Soviet cultural norms, but who were clearly not the kind of committed dissidents who sought to overturn or dramatically reshape the Soviet order.^[3]

 

So what did it mean to take drugs under late socialism? This was not only the age of space flight, but the time of the Cold War, in which both sides were first fascinated and then terrified by the power of mind-altering substances. If the burgeoning hopes of harnessing the power of psychoactive compounds to heal mental illness flourished in the 1950s, by the mid-1960s the cultural tide had dramatically turned. Outside the labs and clinics, vast numbers of susceptible young Westerners freely experimented with LSD and other substances, which, in the eyes of authority, went hand-in-hand with the rise of countercultural movements that seemed to fundamentally threaten social order and cultural norms. Recognising the undeniable power of these compounds to drastically alter people’s minds, governments on both sides of the Cold War divide tried desperately to force the genie back into the bottle, taking it off the streets and back into the laboratory – this time with the intention of using it as a chemical weapon against their enemies.

 

This was the combustible context in which Azazello used his illicit drugs, and as we join him on his voyages of self-discovery, we uncover a story that does not simply challenge the idea that life under late socialism was as dull and predictable as Brezhnev’s speeches.  To alter his consciousness was not merely to ‘drop out’ or numb the pain of official reality. Azazello, like his hippie comrades, was not simply rejecting the Soviet world, but trying to construct a life that felt truly authentic and meaningful. Drugs would prove to be a powerful aid in this quest. They unleashed his creative energy, allowing him not only to draw often mesmerising images, but also to gain direct experience of the more beautiful and peaceful world that he wished existed. In doing so, he experimentally drew on the teachings of Buddhist philosophy and the world of fairytales and folk traditions, which he then struggled to integrate into his daily life. His drug reveries, both in his mind and on the page, might seem impossibly strange and abstract, but, as we’ll see, they were in truth attempts to to see himself and his world more clearly.

 

Azazello’s is a fascinating yet ultimately tragic story. While drugs thrust open the doors of perception and became his muse for at least a decade, they would by the early 1980s become his tormentor and eventually lead to his downfall. In the following pages, we attempt to recover this extraordinary life that would otherwise be lost to history; to understand what drug-taking could personally mean to a free-spirit caught inside a world of stifling conformity; and to ask what altering one’s consciousness with the aid of illicit substances represented in the context of late socialism.

 

Azazello’s life was exceptional in many ways, yet it continues to have resonance in our own times. Today in the West we are bearing witness to a ‘psychedelic renaissance’, in which scientists have taken up the torch abandoned in the 1960s and are demonstrating with academic rigour that mind-altering substances have immense power to heal psychological wounds and help people to construct lives they find meaningful.^[4] We can also see a similar searching for mystical experience in the mainstream adoption of meditation (repackaged as ‘mindfulness’) and yoga practices drawn from ancient Eastern traditions. Azazello had to live in far more repressive times than ours, but his quest to find meaning and self-acceptance in a modern and often confusing world, proves remarkably familiar to us even today.

 

 

Azazello’s Pharmacopeia

 

Although Azazello’s art is clearly ‘psychedelic’ in the loose sense, as far as we can tell he did not have access to the classic psychedelic drugs that played such a prominent role in the Western counterculture of the 1960s-70s, like LSD, ‘magic’ psilocybin mushrooms, or mescaline. Still, ‘psychedelic’ means ‘mind-manifesting’ – these chemical compounds are understood to bring us into more direct, if still enigmatic, dialogue with our subconscious, drawing our emotional and psychological cornerstones to the fore in vibrant technicolour. Azazello’s art clearly shows he was having similar experiences, even though he was using different compounds.^[5]

 

Nevertheless, for us to appreciate what Azazello was experiencing in his altered states, we need some understanding of the substances he was taking. To only say ‘he took drugs’, is as meaningful as saying ‘he ate food’ if we were trying to understand his nutritional state.

 

When it came to drugs, opium was his true love. Countless pages of his notebooks are filled with luxuriant and beautifully drawn poppy plants, sometimes growing in the wild, but often growing into or out of the faces and bodies of the various humans and animals that he drew. His life, like his notebooks, was deeply entwined with the poppy and the opium held within it.

 

The powerful effects of the poppy could be harnessed in various ways. It could be smoked, brewed as a tea, or distilled sufficiently to be injected intravenously. It seems clear from the abundance of syringes in Azazello’s journals, that this was for him at least the iconic method of taking the drug, though that’s not to say he didn’t use other methods.

 

Azazello was a veritable alchemist in the kitchen, improvising and perfecting his own personal formula that would thrust open the doors of perception. He mixed crude mak (literally ‘poppy’, but in practice the milky juice of white poppy pods) into some personal concoction, the precise nature of which remains a mystery. Such polyphamaceutical mixtures have always had a place in the history of opiate addiction, whether officially prescribed or otherwise.^[6]

 

Indeed, when Azazello laid back and pushed the plunger of the syringe or inhaled the powerful vapours from a pipe, he became part of a vast history of ‘opium eaters’. The ancient Greeks knew of its pain-relieving qualities; the Ebers Papyrus (dating from c.1600 BC) and related texts suggest that the ancient Egyptians also knew of its powerfully analgesic properties.^[7] It’s no exaggeration to say that opium is ‘the parent of all narcotic drugs’,^[8] working on the endorphin centres of the brain to create a deeply rewarding state of contentment, and alleviating both physical and psychological pain.^[9]

 

But opium not only numbs, it can also induce waking-dream reveries which have a richly documented history of nurturing artistic expression, from the most notorious and public ‘opium eater’ – Thomas de Quincey – to Coleridge, Keats, Schopenhauer, Berlioz, Walter Benjamin and Nietzsche.^[10] Here, too, in chronicling his experiences and visions, Azazello forms part of a much longer tradition, reminding us that in taking and being inspired by this ancient plant, this was an experience and practice which cannot be fully understood within a Soviet context alone. When we ask questions about people taking drugs in Soviet society, in a hippie milieu, or in the 1960s-70s generally, it’s vital to recognise that much of it could be motivated by fundamentally human issues and experiences which stretched beyond and across these contexts.

 

If it came to drawing up a hierarchy of his drug preferences, Azazello’s position was clear: as he put it in a brief couplet, ‘I need opium, I don’t need grass’.^[11]  All the same, Azazello did use cannabis, which has a similarly rich and perhaps even more ancient history, used for millennia to alter consciousness and treat innumerable diseases. Its effects are both similar and different to opiates: cannabis combines relaxation effects with openness, talkativeness, and distortions of perception. In other words, this was the more social drug Azazello favoured, but one which can also produce visual, arguably psychedelic, effects at higher doses, especially when ingested rather than smoked.^[12]

 

Although Azazello was no stranger to stimulants such as ‘vint’ (a mixture of ephedrine with red phosphorus and iodine, which creates methamphetamine),^[13] he clearly favoured those substances which created a sense of tranquillity, dissociation, hallucinations and creativity.^[14] In other words, the great majority of the drugs he took cultivated fundamentally inward-looking, personal experiences.

 

 

Lost Connections

 

It’s all too easy to label Azazello and those like him as ‘drug addicts’, with all the heavily negative connotations that evokes. Since the advent of the ‘War on Drugs’, the shadowy yet tragic figure of the drug addict has been the international shorthand for ‘socially undesirable’. The focus has long rested on the corrupting influence of the drugs themselves, as if they were toxic contagions which, upon exposure, could ruin anybody’s life by almost immediately enslaving them. This fear was crystallised in the infamous ‘Just Say No’ anti-drugs campaign championed by Nancy Reagan.

 

But in the past two decades new scientific and psychotherapeutic research has all but overthrown this chemically-focused perception. The leading addiction specialist Gabor Maté has shown that addictions of all stripes originate in trauma and emotional loss, rather than in the chemical compounds which drug users consume. Whether or not we can identify what that trauma was, Maté makes the crucial point that addictive behaviour is not itself the problem: it is an attempt to solve a problem. Drugs can offer a temporary reprieve from suffering and so many people use drugs in the effort to feel better and overcome their problems, even though their behaviour offers, at most, a temporary band-aid for a much deeper wound.^[15]

 

The question we should be asking, therefore, is what any given ‘addict’ is trying to salve or to escape; what hole are they trying to fill? Azazello, like so many others, found respite in drugs from his lifelong struggle to feel a sense of connection, community, and of having a meaningful place in the world. Although never formally diagnosed, his often despairing diary entries and prose pieces reveal a man struggling with the same demons which we now understand to be the root causes of depression and anxiety.^[16] The pain and melancholy in Azazello’s notebooks was reflected across the hippie milieu, where, behind the colourful clothes and carnivalesque playfulness, we also find many self-destructive displays of deep emotional, and even spiritual, pain. Many cut themselves and a seemingly disproportionate percentage of Soviet hippies committed suicide, disappeared, or overdosed on alcohol or other drugs.^[17]

 

In their experience of this profound dislocation, they were the children of their times and not exclusively of the Soviet world they grew up in. Becoming a hippie or taking a mind-altering substance was to express a desire for something which contemporary society failed to provide on either side of the Iron Curtain. One didn’t need to be a sociologist to see that the root causes were largely the same: as Albert Hofmann, the father of LSD, put it in words that continue to ring true to this day, the ‘inebriant mania’ of the 1960s was not due to the discovery of LSD, but

 

had deep-seated sociological causes: materialism, alienation from nature through industrialization and increasing urbanization, lack of satisfaction in professional employment in a mechanized, lifeless working world, ennui and purposelessness in a wealthy, saturated society, and a lack of a religious, nurturing, and meaningful philosophical foundation of life.

 

As such, he added, the rise of the hippie movement and the widespread use of LSD ‘cannot be dissociated’.^[18] While the material abundance of the Western world that Hofmann described hardly applies to the Soviet Union, the underlying dissatisfactions and disappointments were undeniably similar. In Azazello’s notebooks we feel a near-constant yearning to escape a sense of (spiritual) sickness in his life and to discover a sense of place, be it in the natural world, or, as we’ll see later, in an imagined past of medieval fairytales.^[19]

 

Whether capitalist or communist, the modern world of the 1960s and ’70s seemed to lack a place for the postwar generations, which drove them to create subcultures to help make up for the lost connections they felt to mainstream society. Whether they became punks, yogis or hippies, they sought to overcome a pervasive sense of spiritual impoverishment.^[20]

 

For Soviet hippies this could take the form of a small commune like the parody-infused Yellow Submarine in Leningrad,^[21] which offered a tangible sense of alternative community – an air-pocket within the stifling conformism of mainstream society – or the more psychological sense of connection with a broader hippie world – the sistema – that could involve trips to visit other ‘cells’, but whose most potent value was the sense of an imagined community it created. The hippies’ shared meeting places, particular styles of dress and appearance, along with an insider slang, likewise fostered a sense of being connected to other people ‘like us’, allowing a second, more personal landscape to be mapped onto the Soviet one.^[22] But sometimes – and clearly for Azazello – this still wasn’t enough.

 

Drugs seemed to offer something more, but until recently our ability to understand what that was has been distorted by misleading extrapolations from laboratory experiments. Drug addiction had long been seen a social ill, so in the early twentieth century, scientists and doctors increasingly tried to understand it by performing lab tests on animals. The long-standing idea that addiction is caused solely by the irresistible chemical pull of the drugs themselves gained seemingly incontrovertible proof by studies on rats, in which the rodents, when offered a choice between morphine-infused water and regular water, would endlessly return to the seductive opiate until they eventually died. However, in the late 1970s, B.K. Alexander, a Canadian psychologist, revealed a profound flaw in these studies. The morphine-addicted rats, despite their deeply social nature, had been locked in isolated, tiny cages with no source of distraction or exercise. When he created ‘Rat Park’ – a vast Disneyland for the rodents, filled with tunnels, toys and rats of all ages – the results could scarcely have been more different. While some tried the opiate a few times, they rapidly lost interest. In a stimulating environment more suited to their nature, morphine held little appeal.^[23]

 

Decades of further research and clinical practice continues to show that for humans, too, our environment – physical, social and psychological – is a far greater determining factor in the likelihood of becoming a drug addict than the substance itself.^[24] We find an emblematic example in the return of American troops from Vietnam: despite government fears that the troops’ extremely widespread use of opiates would produce a domestic emergency and threat to civil society when they came home, the vast majority simply left the habit behind them. In the alternately violent and stressful tension of war, heroin helped them to cope; back home, in a completely different environment, it no longer held the same allure.^[25]

 

In short, chemistry can only take us so far in understanding why someone uses drugs in any society. Azazello, like so many hippies, took drugs not primarily because the chemicals forced him into a state of dependence,^[26] but because the underlying sense of dissatisfaction and social alienation from the conservative mainstream continued to be a source of deep psychological and emotional pain.

 

 

Human Universals

 

Taking drugs could never act as a magic pill to overcome these issues, but Azazello was not taking drugs simply to numb the pain or as an inadequate band-aid for his suffering. In any case, it’s too reductive to talk about people – especially the more spiritually self-conscious hippies, and especially Azazello, with his clear interest in Eastern spirituality – taking drugs just to get ‘high’. Opium did much more for him than that, and he consciously used it in the pursuit of deeply creative, personal development. The zone of kaif was not simply a chemical ‘pause’ button on his life, and, more importantly, why he chose to enter it could have a remarkable impact on what he would find there.^[27]

 

The power of ‘set and setting’ is not just the talk of Timothy Leary and his acolytes, but is now a crucial part of FDA-approved psychedelic research.^[28] ‘Set’ means the mindset and purpose which someone brings to a drug experience, while ‘setting’ is the context in which they take the drug in question. Both can have a profound impact on the nature and quality of the experience. If we ingested a drug like opium or cannabis by accident, our experience of it would be very different than if we had knowingly taken it. Most likely, we would think that we’d been poisoned or were having a psychotic episode (just as Albert Hofmann did when he first accidentally ingested LSD).^[29]

 

But even if we consciously choose to take a drug, purpose and context still profoundly shape the experience. We don’t need to take a tab of LSD to understand how this works. The same dynamic holds true for our experience of a much more common, legal drug: alcohol. Drinking in company and drinking alone can be markedly different experiences, and even more so if we drink with the hope of banishing loneliness and anxiety, rather than raising a toast to a friend at their birthday party. The drug itself certainly brings particular effects into play, but the situation and motivation are just as – and sometimes far more – determinate of the overall experience.

 

Azazello often had a clear purpose behind his drug use: he set out to use opium entheogenically. An ‘entheogen’ (the term comes from the Greek, meaning ‘generating the divine within’), is a word used to describe any psychoactive substance which produces a spiritual experience. Throughout human history and in every culture, mind-altering substances have been taken with the intention of inducing spiritual (self-)discovery and development.^[30] This was how Azazello approached opium, which we can see time and again as poppies appear throughout his notebooks, sprouting out of or giving birth to fantastic images: they were the catalyst for his creativity and expression.

 

In this, Azazello was doing something innately human. As the psychopharmacologist and pioneering drug researcher David Nutt puts it, ‘Deliberately creating altered states of consciousness is one of the human universals, like language and music. The few societies who haven’t historically had some kind of botanical help have used fasting or long periods of sleeplessness to achieve these kinds of mental states’, as well as chanting, drumming, isolation and sweat lodges.^[31]

 

In the modern industrial world, awareness and understanding has faded regarding this ancient universal, but Azazello was not alone in continuing its legacy: many of his fellow hippies described their use of drugs as varieties of spiritual experience, calling them ‘a convention with God’, a consciousness expansion that was ‘metaphysical’;^[32] and, of course, they were a defining element of Western countercultural spirituality more broadly. Within these experiences, Azazello, like other hippies, was searching for something – something unavailable within the official fabric of Soviet reality, or even within the unofficial consensus reality of ‘how things really work’ that most citizens had come to quietly navigate in the years of late socialism.

 

Azazello was searching for mystical experience – a transcendence of the everyday, into a world of fairytales, natural beauty, and freedom in which both mind and heart were opened and harmonised. There was little if any space for these experiences in the Soviet Union, unless you were the sort of person who felt the Earth move at the sight of a 1 May parade. Secular ceremonials, especially those based on ‘scientific progress’ and ‘logic’, simply lacked any deeper emotional resonance.

 

Although opium is not considered a classic ‘psychedelic’, Azazello’s intention (his ‘set’) in taking it was to be part of the consciousness exploration he knew was taking place in the West. He later related a far-fetched tale of experiencing LSD in 1980 (which involved some friends stealing over a million strong doses from a research laboratory and then brainstorming whether diluting it in a bathtub would give them the right dosage). However, when pressed to say whether he’d ever truly taken ‘acid’, he dodged the question by saying vaguely that he’d used a lot of different drugs in his time.^[33] In telling this unbelievable tale, he was most likely expressing a desire to feel part of the broader cohort of hippie psychonauts, and this very desire, combined with imagery, stories and Western music, shaped the nature of his opium reveries, providing him a different doorway through which to enter similar realms at the experiential, if not the chemical, level.

 

As he put it in one of his haphazard English-language poems, his drug-induced world was one of ’Freedom, love and needle’. The three are intimately linked in his mind, and on the page with images of sunlight and birds soaring freely in the sky. The core hippie tenets – the ideals and emotions that he strove to experience – were all affirmed in conjunction with his drug use.^[34] One didn’t need to use drugs to be a hippie, but using drugs with the right mindset could make Azazello feel like he truly was part of an international hippie movement that he could otherwise only learn about second- and third-hand.

 

 

 

Know Thyself

 

But transcendent drug experiences are not simply about a rush of exotic imagery or the enjoyable sense of the shackles of everyday reality falling away. While they could help Azazello to feel a sense of spiritual connection, and that he was part of the sistema of worldwide hippiedom, his search was predominantly more inward-looking.

 

In later interviews, Azazello was frequently unfocused (and seemingly drunk); he jumped from subject to subject, talking in non sequiturs and often contradicting himself. Even when talking about drugs he could be flippant or off-hand, but now and then he would pause and share something which seemed to cut right to the heart of his relationship to drugs and the role they played in his life. Scattered amidst sweeping statements – some grandiose, some self-pitying – he revealed that at the heart of his forays into the zone of kaif, he was a man in search of himself.

 

From Azazello’s own perspective, his drug experiences didn’t give him deep philosophical insights into reality per se, but something much more personal: ‘No, it’s not that [the drug experience] increases consciousness-knowledge – you come to know yourself better’. The doors of perception didn’t just lead outward, but also opened onto the inner world, casting often stark light upon it: ‘Drugs – they reveal a person’, he summed up. He said this in relation to someone he disliked, so, he continued, under the influence of drugs, ‘the rot creeps out’. But, by the same token, honest and good people would also be revealed under the influence.^[35] Azazello clearly hoped that he would fall into the latter category, but he was tormented by deep feelings of inadequacy which drove him to continue searching for some grain of reassurance in his reflective opium reveries.

 

And so, amidst the intentionally cryptic, and perhaps less intentionally clichéd, poetry and pictures in his notebooks, we find a sympathetic, attractively naïve lost soul in search of self-understanding. On the first pages of a notebook from 1977, Azazello spelled this out directly: ‘This was a difficult year for me. I still didn’t really come to know myself’.

 

On the page before this laconic sentiment, we find several lines that seem to shiver between self-flagellation and Azazello’s trademark wry humour. The page is headed ‘Don’t Read’, before expanding to say why: ‘If someone does still read these [notes and drawings], they won’t be of interest because they don’t represent or explain anything to anyone’.^[36]

 

We can read these words in several ways, and in doing so we discover something crucial about the enigmatic, contradictory nature of Azazello’s relationship to drugs, what they meant to him, and what they can tell us about his life and the world in which he lived.

 

We might take the personal level: he feels lost and in search of himself, shielding this vulnerable quest behind a reflexive dismissiveness of these assays into self-understanding. We can also see evidence of the painful cultural alienation he struggled with: would anyone who happened across his notebooks in the Soviet Union be able to understand their fantastical imaginative landscapes, or Azazello himself? He certainly didn’t seem to think so, yet these were the inside workings of his mind, so it no doubt caused him pain to feel so seldom understood.

 

Or we might see these stark, dismissive words as part of Azazello’s character of the jester or fool – playing with the fields of order and chaos and here negating something even as he created it. Perhaps we should hold all three perspectives at once, because these notebooks, like Azazello’s life in the Soviet Union, were complex, contradictory, and without any singular meaning.

 

In this, Azazello’s self-portrayals resemble the late-socialist practice of stiob – a post-ironic irony which hippies mixed into their own playful humour^[37] – where it could seem impossible to distinguish between genuine sentiment and sardonically mouthing the words.^[38] Speaking in stiob – straight-faced, yet possibly joking beneath the surface – was not to voice a clear and certain view, but to explore how you felt and thought without having to commit yourself completely to any viewpoint. It was a careful way to flirt with taboo and sensitive issues while retaining a degree of plausible deniability – deniability both to the state, and, when dealing with emotional frustrations, to yourself.

 

Indeed, the hippies were in the process of making sense of the world around them, of trying to discover patterns in the contradictions of the Soviet Union and their emotions in order to find ways to get on and get by. Azazello’s personal quest was part of the broader hippie experience of trying to find out who they were. As he put it, in the early 1970s he and his fellow long-haired misfits were only just beginning to understand what ‘hippie’ even meant.^[39] As they developed their sistema, and as Azazello smoked on his pipe and sketched what he saw amidst the vapours, they continued to search for who they were and a place they could belong.

 

Vision-inducing drugs foster a similar kind of indeterminacy, with multiple realities held in a provisional state, which can seem to flicker between playful, confusing, and deeply alarming. In this sense, Azazello’s drug experiences, like a more embodied and non-negotiable stiob – played a role in, but also crystallised the indeterminacy of the late socialist period.

 

Azazello was in many ways a playful explorer who didn’t take himself or the world around him too seriously; yet, like all ‘holy fools’, behind the carnivalesque clowning there was really something far more serious going on. Some Soviet hippies, like Tsen Baptist, were committed to a hippie life lived and performed as a permanent carnival that inverted the everyday world, but for most hippies, and perhaps Baptist himself, there was always a trace of melancholy beneath the surface. While they tried to celebrate their ‘freakishness’, it was still painful not to fit into the world they were forced to live in, and immensely difficult to escape the feeling that something was simply wrong with them.^[40] Taking pride in being different is a personally taxing enterprise; permanent carnival is as exhausting as it sounds. So while they sought to create a different world for themselves, this alternative sistema, with its own insider mythology, was always in friction with the Soviet one which surrounded, conditioned and constricted it.

 

While it was fun to play and puncture the stifling seriousness of Soviet life, using subversive humour to mock the non-sistema world in order to create a reassuring mental distance from it, Azazello couldn’t play forever. Being dismissive of both the Soviet world and his own peculiar life was a classic defence mechanism, writing them off as if they were a joke so that they couldn’t hurt him.^[41] But it was still the only life he had, and in his notebooks we can see that beneath the clown’s mask was a lost and tormented soul.

 

As he sought to discover who he was, in the pages of his notebooks Azazello drew himself into a variety of different characters. But even as he tried on these roles for size, he rarely found one that truly fit or felt like him. If anything, they could exacerbate his sense of alienation.

 

He drew Narcissus gazing into the water, but added next to the reflection, ‘I am the anti-Narcissus’. This was not the reflection of a beautiful, self-obsessed creature, but its antithesis: a deeply unattractive person simultaneously obsessed with and disgusted by himself.^[42] This relationship to himself essentially mirrored the one he had with drugs, as he recognised in later years: they fascinated yet repulsed him simultaneously. They could calm his neuroses and imbue him with a sense of freedom and self-acceptance, yet when he returned to Earth, those qualities deserted him, leaving him wondering if the person the drugs revealed was merely self-obsessed and inadequate.

 

Indeed, the riotous carnivals of colour and excitement which he found on the other side of the needle or the opium pipe were just one aspect of the worlds he found inside himself. Maybe more revealing to us of his drug experiences is not the dancing figure of Pan, the classic embodiment of Bacchanalian carnival who we see capering across a notebook from 1977, but the small, melancholic, half-shadowed face beneath the satyr, alongside which Azazello wrote (in English) ‘I am my friend’.^[43] This mournful image seems more in tune with the Azazello we find in his writings – behind the capering, he was a man struggling to find self-acceptance, perhaps experimenting here with (to him) the challenging idea that he could be a friend to himself. Opium could open a door into his inner world, but it could not remedy the difficult emotional landscape which lay there.

 

Nevertheless, if his opium odysseys failed to give him any lasting reassurance of his own self-worth, they did provide Azazello with powerful tools to aid him on his journey. As he put it, ‘kaif taught me to draw. [And about] music.’^[44] They unleashed his creative side and allowed a more ‘authentic’ self to emerge; they helped him to reach beyond the self-doubt and express himself artistically. Unlike drug-taking, we understand artistic output more readily as a means of self-exploration and healing, but it was the drugs which opened these outlets to him and effectively became his muse. Being ‘high’ remained deeply connected to his artistic expression and in later life he continued to be dismissive of the ‘sober’ work he produced, considering it somehow less ‘authentic’.^[45]

 

 

Self-Expression

 

Yet, all the same, these were pathways, but not a destination. Azazello continued to struggle to find any authentic self he could rely on, and this lack of confidence and self-love made it difficult for him to find connections with others: he felt like an outsider even among his fellow hippies. If opium helped to unleash his artistic side, when we look closely at some of his creative endeavours, we are drawn deeper into the emotional struggles which led him to use drugs in the first place.

 

The overall tone of his work is of a naïve hopefulness struggling against an underlying sense of depression, disconnection and isolation. His Russian-language poetry speaks to these themes, but when he wrote verses in English, the limitations of his vocabulary sometimes distilled his emotional world down to its essence:

 

When I can’t sleep

When I can’t sleep

When I can’t close my eyes

I really need, yeah, need, I need

And try to hear someone crys

Well, I looked at smoke of [c]igarette

Blue-green pillow of my dream

Sssh, did you hear one sound now

The scream of the wind

The sound was born into the wild fire

Was born into the eyes of dead

Was born into the ears of deaf

Was born into my mind

Was born into your head

When I can’t sleep

When I can’t fall to dream

I open the door into new world

You get me, the door is the window on my head

I open the door into new world

and can get everything.^[46]

 

Here we see Azazello the insomniac, isolated and alone, yet yearning for a sense of connection. Unlike his vibrant drawings, in his lyrics there is often a stultifying deadness to his life (yet through the symbols of nature (the sun, stars, trees, or water), he reaches for a transcendent connection to something higher). This particular poem aches with a sense of dislocation and loneliness matched by a forlorn yet desperate desire for connection. But the emotional upswing in the final lines seems to herald something better. Suddenly the oppressive deadness of his life can be escaped through a window or door in his mind. When he walks through it, he’s reborn into a new world of infinite possibilities, of vivid mental landscapes which, as we’ll see later, he often drew as literally bursting forth from his head.

 

Drugs and love are twinned in the mythology of hippiedom, and here we can see them mixing together in the allusive language as well as in his myriad drawings of syringe-wielding hippies proudly adorned with slogans of love and peace. Perhaps it’s opium that ‘opens the door into [a] new world’ for Azazello (it certainly opened his mind to all manner of worlds, as his psychedelic artwork testifies), but it may also have been love. In these lines, he seems to address someone directly – probably Ofelia, the love of his life – whose love might also pull him through to that new world. This is certainly one way to read the word ‘get’ in the lines ’You get me’ and ‘[I] can get everything’, but even if ‘get’ implies possession here, the emotional timbre of these words clearly thrums with a desire for belonging and to be cared about.

 

On the very next page, he riffs on The Rolling Stones’ song ‘Gimme Shelter’, changing the lyrics to make it ‘just a kiss away’ and placing them alongside a tall, long-haired figure who seemingly speaks the final, reassuring line: ‘I’ll show you your shelter’. This figure, who seems to be beckoning us to follow him, has a large trumpet emerging from his head, perhaps symbolising his ability to connect with and understand Azazello well enough to lead him to a place of greater safety. The man wields a syringe aloft, but while drugs are clearly part of this journey, the emotional drive is more significant. Again, drugs form only one part of an attempt to address much deeper, emotional difficulties which we can see played out through the medium of Azazello’s artistic expression.

 

 

Chasing Enlightenment

 

Azazello was consciously and actively using drugs as tools to explore himself and his place in the world. But he did not set out on this quest without a map, as we can see from the long notebook he dedicated to the study of Buddhism and Eastern mysticism.^[47]

 

Using mind-altering substances to complement and induce deep insights has an astonishingly long and global history. Drug artefacts in the archaeological record have been dated as far back as pre-2000 BC, with sites such as the ancient civilisation of Chavín (in modern-day Peru) bearing testament to unusually peaceful cultures formed around ceremonial practices dedicated to the use of powerful mind-altering substances.^[48] Wisdom traditions including Ancient Greece’s Eleusinian Mysteries – which used the psychoactive kykeon potion in their ritual practice – and the far older Indian spiritual systems – which used the now-mysterious soma and amrita potions to induce powerful altered states – used these substances in pursuit of the highest spiritual realisations.^[49]

 

Azazello may not have held drugs in the same sacramental regard as the wisdom traditions, yet not only did he consider them to reveal deep personal truths, as we’ve seen, but when we study his notebooks closely, we can see Buddhist philosophy and his opium dreams interact in delicate, sensitive and deeply personal ways.

 

On a page headed ‘Negatives in the material world’, Azazello drew several of his familiar warped and ethereal faces, before adding ‘…always, it means I am not me’ (я не я). Beneath this, we find a peculiar picture in which a human face is melded into the fabric of a small house with walls riddled by holes, like a block of Swiss Cheese. He labelled it ‘ME’ (Я).

 

This image is both psychedelic in tone and spiritual in significance: the sense of having a concrete, existing ‘self’ is forcibly pulled apart during powerful trips, just as it is – albeit more gently – in the teachings of Buddhism. In this image, Azazello’s identity is drawn as a structure that can barely hold together. If this sense of a fragmentary identity often caused him pain, here – beyond the material world – it may not have been a negative at all.

 

He stands on the cusp of ego-dissolution, the ‘no-self’ which is one of the highest realisations on the path to enlightenment. Buddhism emphasises that our ‘self’ (who ‘I am’) is a story we tell ourselves, defining but ultimately trapping us as we try to hold onto and control that story, without realising that if we let go – frightening though it may feel – we are then free to choose who and what we are from moment to moment. Strange as it may seem, drug experiences can teach the same lesson: letting go is often vital to having a positive experience. ‘Bad trips’ are almost always caused by refusing to let go of control and trying to escape the more challenging spectres of the inner psyche which often arise in these altered states.^[50]

 

Attempting to walk the paths of Buddhism and mind-altering substances together, as Azazello did, was not just a countercultural fashion. The latest scientific research has shown that brain scans of advanced meditators and of subjects dosed with psilocybin or LSD look remarkably similar. Both meditative and psychedelic states quieten what scientists call the Default Mode Network, the part of the brain which usually acts as the conductor of our mind’s orchestra, controlling how each section interacts with the others. When the conductor – the storyteller of who ‘I am’ – is taken offline, it’s as though our ego dissolves, allowing different parts of our brain to free-associate, as children’s do. And then, ultimately, to break down our sense of separation between self and the rest of the world.^[51] There are no studies yet to show us if opium produces similar effects, but the content of Azazello’s drawings strongly suggests that it helped him, along with his Buddhist studies, to have similar experiences of dissolution.

 

This also coincided with the hippies’ identity as ‘flower children’ with an abiding love for and connection with nature. The dissolution of the self not only – temporarily – ended Azazello’s sense of isolation from other people, it gave him a sweet taste of a still greater union with the natural world. His notebooks are littered with images of plant-life, trees, and the ever-present life-giving energy of the sun, but this union finds its fullest expression in images of faces dissolving into these natural elements – the more peaceful, accepting counterpart of his Swiss Cheese house.^[52] This is also captured in a poem, where he writes about dying yet simultaneously finding true freedom in the skies – returning to and being enveloped within nature.^[53]

 

As we’ll explore later, many of Azazello’s drawings are of faces (all of which ultimately are his own) with opened heads filled with cavalcades of exciting characters or beautiful vistas. One in particular emphasises his drug-and-Buddhism-infused forays into consciousness-expansion, in which a grasping hand appears from the head, reaching skywards and labelled ‘Consciousness’. Next to it is scrawled ‘Death’: the boundaries between the two are ephemeral and ineffable; with the dissolution of self, there is always a death of sorts as the mind expands beyond the ego.^[54]

 

Azazello didn’t find it easy to enter that peaceful place, even if he could touch it from time to time. He struggled in the darkness of insomnia-filled nights and of his own mind. But drug-visions and Buddhist insights continued to light the way. Indeed, one of the most intriguingly enigmatic images which appears repeatedly in Azazello’s notebooks is the ‘lantern-head’. These disembodied heads appear in different forms, with a pole of some kind extending from their foreheads, from which hangs a shining lantern.^[55]

 

We find a clue to unravelling this mysterious image on a page infused with references to Buddhism, on which Azazello drew a ‘yogi’, from whose head extends the familiar pole. Here we find not a lantern, but a tiny meditating figure, perhaps even the Buddha himself. The rest of the page is significantly taken up with other ‘yogi’ figures in various poses, and there is a reference to karma on the opposite page, so it seems clear Azazello was continuing to reflect on Buddhism or Eastern Mysticism more generally when he made these sketches.^[56]

 

In this context, it becomes clearer what the lanterns represent: a search for enlightenment. Like the Buddha figure, the lanterns are suspended right in front of the eyes, so perhaps Azazello, in some frustration, saw the possibility of enlightenment – of a deep, tranquil sense of understanding – as a carrot hung always just out of reach. On the other hand, it would be more in accord with his Buddhist reading if we understood these suspended symbols in a different way. The trick is to realise that the lantern-light’s energy source is coming from within the mind of the seeker themselves, which quite beautifully encapsulates one of the core Buddhist teachings: that enlightenment already lies in each of us. We already possess ‘Buddha nature’, but our challenge is to recognise it. In other words, the way we see the world is conditioned by the particular light our minds cast upon it.^[57]

 

Azazello pursued this new kind of seeing, obsessively drawing eyes on almost every page of his notebooks, some gazing upwards, some fixing the viewer with an often disturbing intensity. Others – usually resting in the heads of various characters, rather than disembodied – are stranger still. These feature syringes protruding from the eyeball, liquid dripping from the needle.^[58] But what at first seems rather macabre carries a more subtle meaning. In these images, drugs are creating a new kind of vision – a new kind of seeing and perception of the world.

 

We often reflexively think of drug-taking as a way to blur reality so that we don’t have to deal with it, but for Azazello, drugs were part of his attempt to see more clearly. Eastern spiritualism captures this attempt in the ancient concept of the Third Eye – located in the centre of the forehead, but invisible to ordinary sight – which is deeply associated with true vision and wisdom.^[59] Azazello was drawn to this concept, but once again connected it directly with his drug experiences. One of his most evocative drawings features a beautifully-rendered lantern-head, with its mind wide open and filled with fantastical imagery. A second face emerges from inside the lantern-head, and has a syringe sticking out from the centre of its Third Eye space. The syringe is being plunged into the outstretched arm of a t-shirt wearing, long-haired figure who is surely Azazello himself. Completing the circle, Azazello’s own Third Eye is pictured zooming outwards and towards the fantasy world nested inside the lantern-head.

 

Here we can see the three-part process in which perception is increased via the drug, leading to a wild firing of the mind and imagination. The Third Eye is shown to be using the syringe in order to facilitate the process – the drug is a bridge between worlds, not the source or creator of these different realities, nor an end in itself.^[60]

 

This phase-shifting between different worlds or experiences of them is not confined to ancient, New Age, or even overtly spiritual traditions. The father of American psychology, William James, had reflected in 1902 about the nature of consciousness and reality in his seminal book The Varieties of Religious Experience, based in part on his self-administration of nitrous oxide, from which he came to similar conclusions:

 

our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the flimsiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.

 

Though we might never suspect their existence, James thought they are always there, and if we gain access to them, ‘It is as if the opposites of the world, whose contradictoriness and conflict make all our difficulties and troubles, [are] melted into unity’.^[61]

 

If drugs and spirituality never provided Azazello with lasting ‘answers’ to his existential questions, they nevertheless provided powerful experiences and frameworks in which he struggled with them and – occasionally – found some peace. If his confused sense of identity so often caused him pain, Buddhism and opium allowed him to practise dissolving the personal narratives which so often held him hostage. Taking mind-altering substances helped him enter mental states and mental worlds which allowed him to experience things he lacked in his everyday life – a sense of true belonging and unity with the world, other people, and with himself.

 

 

Escape: To and From

 

We often think of drug-taking as an escape from everyday life, and Azazello, like his fellow hippies, clearly did want to escape mainstream Soviet reality. In part, they made that ‘escape’ simply by adopting a different lifestyle, finding another kind of high in the ‘fuzzy and distorted sounds of rock music’, and creating an insider world of hippie idioms, customs and values.^[62] Drugs could take things to the next level, though, creating an emotional and sensory experience which, at the subjective level, literally tore apart consensus reality and dropped users into strange new worlds, showing them different layers of reality which didn’t feel as fragile as the one they negotiated on the periphery of Soviet society, but which, as William James said, felt like authentic hidden layers, invisible to sober sight.

 

We can certainly make the point that taking drugs could both be a way to leave everyday reality and, as an act, was an officially unacceptable kind of dissidence – a rejection of a regime that was claiming to create an ideal world. Hippies no doubt took drugs in part for the delicious thrill of flipping the bird to the authorities and ‘normies’ of Soviet life, and, as with their long hair and bellbottom trousers, emphasising their difference to them all the more in the process.^[63] But drugs were far more complex and undeniable in their power for them to be experienced or understood solely as an act of disobedience or the assertion of (temporary) agency. They did not just symbolise difference from the norm, but could also provide a tangible experience of it.

 

It’s therefore just as (if not more) important to consider the other side of the coin: not where Azazello was escaping from, but where he was escaping to. What, to use Terje Toomistu’s phrase, was his ‘imaginary elsewhere’, and what, beyond simple ‘rejection’, does it tell us about him and his relationship to Soviet life?

 

As we’ve seen, this was not solely an escape into a chemically-induced kaif – a numbed or euphoric state of surging sensations without some kind of anchoring in particular emotions and mental landscapes. On the contrary, in his notebooks we see Azazello inhabiting particular kinds of worlds, entering an imaginary elsewhere that was inflected both by what he felt he lacked in his Soviet life, and by what he held to be meaningful and important.

 

The most striking element of this is the strong medieval and fairytale themes that sprawl across the pages. He seemed to want to escape to a world of knights, castles and maidens, a world of heroes, quests and chivalry. He toyed at writing fairytales; he drew magnificently intricate portraits of knights, princes and other storybook heroes, setting them loose in worlds filled with castles and impossible beasts.^[64]

 

We don’t have to go too deeply into the world of psychoanalysis to recognise that Azazello’s yearning for a more meaningful life was expressing itself in his opium dreams. At their core, these are worlds which have clear moralities, roles and purposes – they are worlds where quests are fulfilled, love found, and a comforting sense of (romanticised) order is always restored in the end. For Azazello, these worlds, whether at a spiritual or simply a narrative level, seemed to have carried far more emotional significance and meaning than the Soviet one in which he found himself.

 

To adapt Jung, scepticism of and estrangement from the Soviet world caused Azazello to be

 

thrown back on himself; his energies flow towards their source, and the collision washes to the surface those psychic contents which are at all times there, but lie hidden in the silt so long as the stream flows smoothly over its course.

 

His drug use powerfully disrupted that smooth flow of conventional waters, and whipped his inner world up into the current. Jung continues, in remarkable resonance with Azazello’s experience, to describe how attractive an idealised image of the past could be:

 

How totally different did the world appear to medieval man! … all knew exactly what they should do and how they should conduct themselves in order to rise from a corruptible world to an incorruptible and joyous existence. Such a life no longer seems real to us, even in our dreams.^[65]

 

These were things or feelings he wanted – they were projections (like his impressionistic ideas of the West) which don’t tell us simply that he rejected Soviet realities (which, after all, had their own strict order and roles), but about what he wished existed in his life. He longed for a path and a place. Drugs put him in touch with these personal, internal worlds in which he truly felt at home. They were more real than dreams, but they only allowed him to visit, never to live there and never to bring those qualities of purpose and spiritual and emotional order back with him, save for in the pages of personal notebooks.^[66]

 

 

 

Authenticity

 

Although it was impossible to bring a world of knights and fairytales back into the ‘real’ world, Azazello and his fellow hippies nevertheless strove to express their internal, authentic selves. They wore intentionally, vibrantly different clothes which they handmade, not only to be part of wider hippie culture, but, as Azazello emphasised, this was inseparable from their internal life: ‘It’s all part of the same thing: the external should match the internal’.^[67] It was an attempt to show who he was inside.^[68] In the process of externalising it, he tried to breathe life into a something that felt more real than his ‘real life’.

 

Hippiedom was driven in large part by the desire to integrate these internal and external realities, not least because, at the personal level, the psychological friction between the two can be immensely painful. This not only led them to wear their flamboyant clothing despite the risk of arrest and confinement to psychiatric wards or prisons, but also likely contributed to the prevalence of self-harm amongst the hippies which we noted earlier.^[69]

 

Drugs, once again, could provide a powerful, direct experience of integration. In these altered states, the senses can mix in unexpected ways: seeing sound, hearing colour, or even becoming music. We get a taste of this in one of Azazello’s clearly drug-infused drawings of a head in which the physical lines of the face and hair distort and flow (we can almost feel the colours and the world-warping power of the opium), while a disembodied eye gazes upwards towards the slogan ‘Gimme some truth’.^[70]

 

But Azazello wasn’t simply daydreaming colourful scenes that felt important to him. Altered states of consciousness don’t just show us what we already know but frequently include a powerful sense of revealed truth. This is what William James called the ‘noetic quality’ – a sense of deep emotional knowing that goes beyond the mere awareness of facts. As James put it,

 

Mystical states seem to those who experience them to be also states of knowledge. They are states of insight … They are illuminations, revelations full of significance and importance … and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority [afterwards].^[71]

 

The sense of a mystery unveiled that delivers not ‘just’ intellectual understanding, but a much deeper sense of knowing, carries immense personal significance, but is frequently derided by those who haven’t had such an experience.

 

It’s now a cliché to hear of psychonauts repeating the platitude that ‘love is everything’, but as Michael Pollan puts it, while these ‘insights’ wouldn't seem out of place on a Hallmark card,

 

A platitude is precisely what is left of a truth after it has been drained of all emotion. To resaturate that dried husk with feeling is to see it again for what it is: the loveliest and most deeply rooted of truths, hidden in plain sight.^[72]

 

Altered states can reconnect and resaturate those truths, imbuing them with the glow of deep authenticity – a value which lay at the heart of worldwide hippiedom (and ‘drop-out’ cultures more generally). In Russian, this was istina, a deeper truth that went beyond the merely factual pravda, and which Azazello sought to embody and experience in his lifestyle and creative work, leaving him dismissive of some of his sober efforts which, he thought, lacked real soul.^[73]

 

Drugs could thus complement hippie identity at a powerful, experiential level; they did not only symbolise difference, but gave a direct, personal experience of it. They were not just something hippies did, but they induced and cultivated experiences and insights that helped bring the world they desired a step closer to (subjective) reality. Taking drugs and being a hippie was in this way reciprocal: they did not take drugs or ‘be hippies’ in order to be dissidents; they did so in order to be themselves.

 

A central part of that identity was one of childlike innocence. The hippies proudly proclaimed themselves to be flower children, handing out flowers on the unofficial hippie holiday of 1 June to children as ‘fellow innocents’.^[74] This could certainly mean ‘childish’ in the sense of ‘liv[ing] out infantile impulses’ in a society focused on self-conscious seriousness,^[75] but also childlike in the less pejorative sense – of a more playful existence uncontaminated by the norms and programming of conventional society.^[76]

 

In this way, drug experiences aided hippies in their attempts to re-enchant the cold modern world around them. If Max Weber had lamented a ‘disenchantment of the world’ due to the rise of Protestantism, forcing people into ‘lives leached of pleasure and mystery’, a large part of the 1960s-70s counterculture was a search ‘for chemical re-enchantment’.^[77] Even if Azazello (like most hippies of his generation) was hardly an activist for change, he considered hippie culture to be ‘a lighthouse’ or ‘beacon’ (маяк) for Soviet people – a beacon of hope for a different and better life. To him, the hippie flag they fashioned for an exhibition in 1975, emblazoned with slogans of peace (and promptly seized by the KGB), was a ‘knight’s banner’,^[78] a banner betokening a sense of purpose and romance which was so crucial to the hippies’ raison d’être within the grey Soviet world.

 

A flag was just a symbol, but an opium trip was an experience of what that symbol represented. Drug-fuelled states could allow them to feel the change they wanted to be in the world. To retain this childlike mien in a world which shunned it took considerable emotional energy; drugs – especially opiates – could alleviate this sense of weariness and pain directly and allow the inner self to exult freely in the imaginary landscapes of the flower-power world that they sought to will into existence. The drug experiences could make these ideas flesh, and even if they could not take the clarity and certainty back from their trip, the memory of it could remain a touchstone informing their view of the world.

 

Nevertheless, the purpose (the ‘set’) behind drug-taking was important: many hippies were very critical of those who became dependent on drugs, because it compromised their idea of freedom. To be an addict meant not to be a hippie.^[79] But if dependence was the antithesis of freedom, a healthier relationship with mind-altering substances could induce a powerful kind of freedom that allowed some to experience a cornerstone of their identity as hippies.

 

 

Cold War, Drug War

 

Regardless of Azazello’s ‘set’ for his drug voyages, we must still appreciate the ‘setting’ in which he embarked on them. What did it mean to take mind-altering substances under late socialism?

 

Cannabis and even opium were understood in Eastern regions of the USSR to be a part of local culture and customs, creating a potential legal grey zone at the regional level.^[80] But it was also quite possible to smoke a joint in central Moscow in the mid-1970s without repercussions, because relatively few people knew what marijuana was.^[81] Even during an unexpected KGB raid on a hippie apartment commune in 1970s Leningrad, the agents either ignored or failed to see ‘a bucketful of grass on the kitchen table’ and instead made a beeline for the bookcases, searching for forbidden literature.^[82]

 

As in the West, scientific curiosity preceded state crackdowns. In the 1960s, the newly-discovered psychedelics fascinated psychiatrists and psychotherapists across the globe, who believed drugs like LSD could either mimic psychosis (allowing therapists to temporarily experience and thereby understand schizophrenia), or be a powerful aid to therapy which could shortcut the decades many patients might otherwise spend lying on the couch of Freudian psychoanalysis.^[83]

 

In this atmosphere, Stanislav Grof, a Czech psychiatrist who would become an icon in the field of psychedelic and consciousness research, went on a university exchange programme from Prague to Leningrad in 1964, taking 300 ampoules of LSD with him, where he proceeded to conduct daily séances for a month.^[84] Back in Grof’s homeland, the Sadska Clinic in Prague was becoming a pioneering beacon of ‘psycholytic therapy’, using LSD in combination with traditional psychotherapy and creative practices like drawing and painting, to heal patients suffering from mental illnesses including depression, anxiety and compulsive disorders.^[85] Even in Soviet Russia, a psychedelic was sold in the 1960s under the brand name ‘Indopan’ as a treatment for depression.^[86]

 

But this degree of experimental freedom would not last long. Drugs were already difficult to talk about publicly because the regime cited illegal drug-use in the USA as evidence of the profound failures of the capitalist system. As an article in Pravda put it, ‘Devotees of LSD, a new narcotic, seek refuge in the morbid world of hallucinations,’ in the effort to escape from and reject the broken consumerist system.^[87] If drug use was a sign of systemic failings, it was hardly in the Soviet regime’s interest to talk too loudly about its presence at home (some western analysts, for their part, made the same arguments in reverse about drug use under communism).^[88]

 

Behind closed doors, the authorities were concerned not give the Soviet public too many ideas about drugs. If drug use was to be discussed publicly at all, it was only to be done in tones of deep condemnation. The Ministry of Health’s Narcotics Committee intervened to prevent the translation of an article by Nedd Willard, which had been published in the July 1967 edition of World Health. This was the official magazine of the World Health Organization, so it was hardly a venue for trumpeting the positive benefits of illegal drugs, but, in the Ministry’s eyes, the fact Willard even described the range of effects induced by various drugs made them sound too dangerously appealing for the Soviet population to be trusted with the information.^[89] (The ‘correct’ tone was exemplified by an officially-published study of the effects of cannabis on dogs, emphasising that the drug caused catalepsy and ataxia.)^[90]

 

These concerns were accompanied by significant legal changes. Although the Soviet regime disliked any oversight of its internal affairs, it nevertheless signed the UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs in 1961, prohibiting the production and spread of many drugs – including opiates, cocaine, and cannabis – except under government licence. It also signed the 1971 UN Convention on Psychotropic Substances, outlawing and scheduling the many new drugs which had emerged into popular use and consciousness over the intervening decade.^[91]

 

Yet, despite its (warranted) reputation for repressiveness, the Soviet state was rather slow to initiate any crackdown, and its interest in prosecuting drug possession (rather than trafficking)^[92] waxed and waned unpredictably over the decades. Even in the context of forced ‘normalisation’ in Czechoslovakia after the Prague Spring of 1968, the Soviet state did not simply unleash the KGB on the Sadska clinic to confiscate its library and to imprison the doctors and patients. Instead, Sadska was closed using what the programme leader Milan Hausner called ‘the salami technique’, gradually removing funds and permits until it had no choice but to close its doors in 1976.^[93] In this, Sadska shared the fate of the pioneering Spring Grove Psychiatric Research Center in Maryland, which conducted very similar research and lasted just a year longer than Sadska, before being deprived of official oxygen.^[94]

 

For the scientists in both capitalist and socialist systems, the result was the same. The fruits of more than a thousand clinical papers involving some 40,000 patients (along with dozens of books and six international conferences) which had emerged since the 1950s, were wound down and then black-boxed by the mid-1970s, only to re-emerge in the early 2000s.^[95] As the cultural tide changed, state attitudes to drug use and research were remarkably similar across the globe.

 

Azazello knew little of these global trends, but he did know what treatment he could expect if arrested for carrying or using illegal drugs. Compulsory treatment for ‘drug addicts’ – which in practice often meant imprisonment in psychiatric hospitals and the forced administration of other drugs, to the point of torture – was implemented in the Russian Republic in 1972 and standardised across the Soviet Union in 1974.^[96] Doctors were increasingly brought in to advise on criminal cases as how best to ‘treat’ drug users,^[97] but in practice there was little new about the Soviet system’s approach to this ‘social ill’. Just as they had underlain the Gulag system, the twin goals of punishment and rehabilitation ground uncomfortably against each other.

 

But if we are to talk about drugs in the 1970s, the most important story is not one of opium, cannabis or codeine. The most commonly abused drug – and the one which the state was by far most worried about and poured enormous attention and resources into combatting – was alcohol. In the archival record, it’s clear that the state saw alcohol and narcotics as unequal parts of the same problem – usually together, rarely separate, in the official reports both were seen as a social ill, but the weight of emphasis alway fell upon the issue of alcoholism and drunkenness.^[98] Narcotics use was small fry by comparison, forming a relatively minor part of the much larger social health campaigns to stamp out alcoholism, ‘parasitism’, and prostitution.^[99] In these years, the Soviet Union was essentially pursuing its own Temperance Movement, just as it largely fizzled out in the rest of the world.

 

The Soviet government may well have tacitly agreed with the words of V.I. Terent’eva, a schoolteacher in Gor’kii, who wrote to Khrushchev in January 1964 arguing that ‘alcohol is worse than opium’, because people who ‘take narcotics sleep peacefully, not bothering or disturbing anyone,’ unlike the aggressive, noisy and disruptive behaviour of alcoholics.^[100] As a social ill (as modern sociological research continues to confirm), alcohol was a far greater danger than any other drug.^[101] Her own husband was an alcoholic, so it sounded as if Terent’eva would rather he was an opium addict instead. In this context, she urged compulsory treatment for alcoholism rather than focusing solely on other drugs. The Ministry of Health tended to agree, bundling Terent’eva’s letter together with plans to implement compulsory treatment programmes for chronic alcoholics.^[102]

 

If illegal drug use did not cause the same level of visible social disruption, the Soviet state remained deeply concerned about it as a political issue. Domestically, altering one’s consciousness was inherently a threat to a state which sought ideological uniformity and the cultivation of class consciousness. Nevertheless, in the tense and often paranoid climate of the Cold War, the far greater fear was that mind-altering substances would become a massive threat from the outside. In these years, there was effectively ‘a psychic arms race’ underway.^[103]

 

Soviet generals tasked with winning a future world war considered all options available to, or which could be used against, them. This included the terrifying prospect of bacteriological and chemical weapons, which had the potential to wipe out the enemy en masse, with little cost of life to the aggressor. In this context, both sides nervously monitored the other’s use of mind-altering compounds. The Soviet Telegraph Agency (TASS) collected endless news reports on Washington’s use of LSD, bundling them together with information on Agent Orange and other ‘chemical’ and ‘mind control’ weapons, frequently drawing comparisons to the ever-present atomic threat.^[104] For their part, as early as the 1950s, the CIA was deeply concerned that because the USSR and China were not selling ergot fungus (the base ingredient for lysergic acid, which grew widely in Eastern Bloc countries) on the open market that this was a sure sign of stockpiling LSD.^[105]

 

If scientists had previously researched these compounds with the aim of healing, they were now tasked with weaponising them. According to recently declassified documents, at least until the mid-1960s the CIA was forcibly and illegally testing hundreds of mind-altering drugs on mental patients, prisoners, drug addicts in rehabilitation centres, and other vulnerable groups.^[106] They did not want knowledge of these ‘special procedures’ to spread, and even seriously considered lobotomising their unwilling subjects.^[107] Soviet experiments have not been revealed to the same extent, but traces of them have still emerged. A certain Dr Stolbun was convicted in the 1990s for bodily harm caused in his privately-run drug rehabilitation centres, which were rumoured to be KGB-supported black sites for mind-control experiments on the ‘patients’.^[108] LSD experiments were certainly carried out at least on animals at the Serbskii Institute from the late 1960s, which was a Soviet centre for psychiatric research notorious for diagnosing dissidents with mental disorders.^[109] The I.M. Sechenov First Moscow Institute of Medicine also experimented with LSD, along with mescaline and the incredibly powerful psychoactive compound bufotenine.^[110] In light of the harsh treatment and forced administration of other drugs by Soviet psychiatric institutions, the handwritten addition of ‘on animals’ to a document authorising LSD experiments at the Serbskii is, I think, more likely to have been a last-minute cover story than a clarification.^[111] If there were to be experiments with mind-altering substances in these years, the state wanted to remain firmly in control.

 

In short, both the hippies and the Soviet state agreed that mind-altering substances should be explored, but their goals in doing so, and the meanings they attached to it, could not have been more different. For Azazello, drugs were deeply personal; for the state, they were disturbingly political.

 

 

Limited Hallucinations

 

The Soviet state’s attitude to drugs was not very different to its Western counterparts’, even if it could be more brutal when it came to its use of psychiatric prison-hospitals and enforced round-ups of all ‘unsavoury’ persons at particular moments, such as Nixon’s visit in 1972 and the Moscow Olympics in 1980, when the eyes of the world were allowed to peer behind the Iron Curtain.

 

But there was something uniquely different about taking drugs in Soviet society, which had little to do with restrictions and punishments, but was far more important at the subjective, experiential level. Until its dying day, the Soviet Union existed in a state of provisional reality. Since Stalinist times, the state had, with varying degrees of force, insisted that the population ‘see’ a world that had yet to become, and to ‘unsee’ the everyday realities of life which contradicted that utopian vision. In essence, the state demanded that its citizens hallucinate a world which did not exist.

 

Few people were up to the challenge, and instead found ways to live along the fault-lines between rhetoric and reality, navigating an evolving middle zone where principle and practice overlapped. But others, like Azazello, used mind-altering drugs to make, or at least to taste, a whole other world.

 

Mystical drug experience was therefore the inverse of the Soviet one. In Soviet reality, vast quantities of words were expended in the media and public pronouncements to describe a situation which was not experienced by people in their daily lives. On the other hand, the drug experience presented a deeply-felt alternative reality which went beyond and largely defied description. Azazello wanted something that felt real to hold onto – something noetic – but his medieval and fairytale worlds, with their reassuring moral and narrative stability, were difficult to carry beyond the drug realm and into the shadow of the grey Moscow skyline.

 

In the West, hippie devotees of LSD thought they could overcome this problem by conducting their own kind of chemical warfare. The ‘sunshine makers’, among others, synthesised millions of doses in the attempt to spread the Good News gospel of psychedelia, believing that if enough people experienced a mind-altering trip and tasted other realities, the political and cultural order they detested would be overturned.^[112]

 

If the broader, Western hippie movement thought itself ‘an attempt to push evolution, to jump the species toward a higher integration’ with each other and the world,^[113] the Soviet hippie experience was different. Although they lived under a regime which endlessly claimed to be building a bright new future, they were ultimately more concerned with finding ways to live ‘authentically’ within the confines of the Soviet system. Most, like Azazello himself, thought that fighting for political change was simply a waste of time and energy.^[114] If he thought the hippie flag was a knight’s banner, he was ultimately content to see it hanging on the wall, rather than riding into battle with it.

 

In a sense, the Soviet hippies settled for mirroring ‘developed socialism’, living a limited version of their dream and, like the grand Soviet project, deferring the promise of ‘something better’ to somewhere just around the corner or over the horizon.^[115]

 

That the Soviet hippie sistema endured far longer than in the West and then collapsed with the end of the USSR is telling. Certainly, the erection of new borders between former Soviet states and the demise of simple jobs-for-all played a part in this, but it was also a movement defined by defiance against a static system.^[116] When the system fell, as Fürst puts it, ‘this meant not defeat or victory for one side but dissolution of the battlefield’.^[117]

 

 

Ironic Engagements

 

Azazello’s notebooks offer a captivating testament to a vibrant, exotic and strange inner world which was anything but grey and stagnant, as the late Soviet period has so long been characterised. One of the images to which Azazello returned time and again in his notebooks was a fantastic rendering of the inside of his mind. Page after page he drew long, thin faces, but with their heads opened to reveal a vast fairytale-fantastic world which lay within. As we noted before, Azazello felt a deep connection to the world of fairytales, but these pictures show us something still more important. They vividly demonstrate that a whole world of colour, drama, excitement and imagination could remain alive within a Soviet citizen’s mind, regardless of the conditions prevalent outside it. All the same, it’s telling that so many of the worlds that lay within these heads were filled with castles and fortifications; they seem like bastions of a creative and divergent imagination holding out against the incursions of Soviet uniformity.

 

These fantastic landscapes, as well as Azazello’s unorthodox lifestyle, seem at first glance to be a startling aberration in a period that has for decades been characterised as one in which individuality and creativity were stifled.^[118] This was no longer the dark days of Stalin, when families and lives were frequently torn apart by the bloodhounds of the NKVD and millions were routinely arrested for the smallest (and often imagined) acts of nonconformity. But nor had the promise of liberalisation, which had shone for a moment under Khrushchev’s tenure, survived into the 1970s. If Brezhnev’s government was inconsistent in its levels of repression against non-conformists like the hippies, the threat of being rounded up in mass arrests ahead of major state events, or being confined to a prison-hospital, always hung thickly in the air.

 

Yet Azazello and his hippie milieu, for all their colourful bellbottom trousers and long hair, were not so different to the majority of ‘normal’ citizens who went to their office or factory jobs in the dull identikit suits and jackets of late socialism. These people, too, rarely believed in the tired slogans and promises of Brezhnev’s government. While they paid public lip-service to the idea of ‘actually existing socialism’, in conversations around their kitchen tables and in the course of their daily lives they found ways to game or to evade the system, betraying a deeper and widespread realisation that the system did not work as advertised. By this time, the Russian word ‘normal’nyi’ had actually come ‘to mean a person who had a suitable distance to the Soviet system’.^[119]

 

So while the hippies largely refused to mouth the ideological words or get the right haircuts, they held more in common than they realised with the mainstream, who also, but more quietly, wanted to create a personal or even spiritual distance from the regime in order to live a life that could in practice reconcile the endless and often sharp clashes between the soaring rhetoric of how things were supposed to be, and the humdrum, grey repressiveness of everyday experience.

 

Alexei Yurchak, a sociologist whose work has arguably defined our understanding of late socialism for over a decade, tried to capture this ‘state of living that [was] simultaneously inside and outside the system’ with the Russian word ‘vnye’. But Yurchak describes this position as essentially static, as though, having found a way to keep one foot in official, and the other in unofficial realities, Soviet people simply stood still until the fall of the USSR (‘everything was forever until it was no more’, as the title of his book sums up).^[120]

 

Arguably, to think of Soviet contemporaries as living in a state of unchanging vnye is only to replace one kind of stagnation with another. In reality, as Juliane Fürst’s pioneering work shows us, the borders between the ‘official’ and more personal worlds were porous and constantly renegotiated. The restrictions and structures of the Soviet system undeniably and inescapably influenced the lives of everyone who lived under the regime, but the way individual people experienced those elements remained complex and dynamic.

 

Even self-consciously nonconformist groups cannot exist in a vacuum: every counterculture is ultimately defined by the culture it counters; they are not binary poles, but are far more deeply and subtly intertwined. Instead of understanding the official world and everyday realities to always clash head-on, it’s more fruitful to think of these as moments of crosshatching: the interweaving of different influences and values which together create meaning, rather than two sides locked in a zero-sum game of survival.^[121]

 

Although it might seem that Soviet hippies were simply importing the style and values of their Western counterparts – from music to clothing, peace symbols to drug use – they could never wholly ‘drop out’ of the Soviet world which surrounded them on all sides.^[122] When they frequently used parody to define their difference from the mainstream, they riffed just as readily on the tropes of Soviet Newspeak or the words of Marx as they did on the lyrics of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.^[123] They were, in short, differently Soviet.

 

In Azazello’s own life, even when he consciously chose never to work another job, it was the state’s social safety nets and pension provisions which would ultimately enable and, ironically, support his decision to live a life ‘outside’ the system.^[124] Even as the state tried to push hippies and other nonconformists to the sidelines (or to confine them to psychiatric wards) by labelling them ‘crazy’ or ‘schizophrenic’, many hippies embraced this label and turned it into a symbol of their identity. To be labelled ‘crazy’ by a sick society was a badge of honour in their view. But it also had more concrete benefits: it could free them from the hated compulsory service in the Soviet Army, and in effect issued them with a tentative licence to live on the margins of society, which is what they’d wanted all along.^[125]

 

Yet even if both the state and the hippies themselves considered a nonconformist lifestyle to be an act of (passive) resistance to Soviet norms, this still, like the idea of vnye, does not give us a complete picture. A clue to this lies in the fact that by the 1970s the hippies mostly thought of themselves as simply apolitical; they considered any direct struggle for change in the Soviet system to be a waste of energy. What mattered to them was not to change or overthrow the system, but to change how they felt in their daily lives – to find and live a life experienced as meaningful and ‘authentic’, in stark contrast to the double-speak and double-think that ‘normal’ people felt compelled to use. As Fürst puts it, ‘Drop-out cultures strive less for [any] physical change of their environment than for a change in how they feel subjectively’.^[126]

 

Therefore, even if the medieval fortresses in Azazello’s drawings, along with the colourful images of peace, chivalry and honour, felt to him like strongholds against Soviet incursions, they were grounded in and in many ways supported by a Soviet landscape. While he and his fellow hippies tried to keep an ‘ironic detachment’ from Soviet society, it nevertheless ‘provided the soil’ in which they were rooted and ‘in which they grew’.^[127]

 

If we take a closer look at that ‘ironic detachment’, we find that, in truth, this was more of an ironic engagement. Hippie life was defined by a playful humour – they laughed at the system and the ‘normal’ people rather than trying to stand against it with stoney-faced, revolutionary zeal. They enjoyed publicly engaging in the surreal: some wore toilet handles instead of earrings, or took a toy dog around with them which was also used to serve alcohol.^[128] When the Yellow Submarine commune in Leningrad set about defining themselves in their homemade logbook, they did so with playful self-deprecation and parody, weaving their own threads through the Soviet fabric, with the ‘paradoxical combination of irony and earnestness’ that was the Soviet hippies’ trademark.^[129] Even as Azazello wrestled with his spiritual distress, he used humour, riffing on both the bureaucratic Soviet world and his spiritual disconnection by sketching a picture of the gates of Heaven as fortified walls, accessible only ‘with a pass issued by St Peter’.^[130] As Fürst puts it, the hippies ‘were less locked into a head-on conflict but rather engaged in a complex interplay of acceptance, pre-emption and parody’.^[131]

 

Azazello and the hippies were not alone in this practice: these were the golden years of the political anekdot. For Yurchak, this widespread culture of joke-telling was just one more sign of living vnye. In his view, this was a ‘humor that has ceased to struggle’,^[132] a humour as repetitive and uniform as the official propaganda, which ultimately only reinforced a cynical detachment and lack of interest in the official world.^[133] For him, contemporaries were stuck in Soviet mud, recognising and laughing at their misfortune, but entirely unable to change it.

 

But humour, like hippiedom, did far more at the subjective level than hold people in place. Humour by its very nature challenges, questions and explores. Jokes are stories we tell ourselves about our experience of the world which can capture, interrogate, reimagine and soothe that experience, holding tension and emotion in a provisional, playful state.^[134] This is not ironic detachment, but direct and active engagement.

 

When the hippies reinterpreted state slogans or playfully drew up their parodic logbooks, they were not only thrilling in the guilty sense of breaking taboos, but were actively making official language speak to them. They were not simply subverting or rejecting the Soviet air they breathed, but were trying to make it more palatable. This was neither a rejection of the regime outright, nor a static state of vnye – they were engaging with and reimagining Soviet reality.

 

When Azazello took drugs, he was doing much the same thing. Like sharing anekdoty, the drug experience highlighted the fluid and artificial nature of social conventions, cultural norms, and government power. He, like his fellow hippies, was not living in a static vnye. Everything was certainly not forever if you smoked a joint or took some opium, and these were also states filled with novelty, insights and personal revelations. He did not take drugs as an act of defiance, nor solely as a means of escape from Soviet realities; exploring the inner self and alternative perspectives is also something done for its own sake. Taking drugs was likewise not simply an act of ‘dropping out’, but, like jokes which playfully toyed with fantasy and reality, they provided an experience of alternately dropping into and out of different realities, forming a potent reminder and an experience of the fact that the Soviet world they lived in was just one of many possibilities.

 

 

Broken Relationships

 

While drugs could induce playful and exciting experiences, they also had a dark side.

Azazello’s own relationship with them was complex and contradictory. In the interviews he gave in his final years, he remained deeply conflicted about his history of drug use, because it was both a source of powerful creativity and personal development for him, but it was also an increasingly dysfunctional and dependent relationship which cost him more than it ever gave back. As he put it: ‘drugs gave us something, but they also took something away’.^[135]

 

Taking potentially addictive substances that allowed him to dwell temporarily in other realities could be highly dangerous when he was not safely at home sketching and writing in his notebooks. Perhaps the most dramatic example of when things could go wrong came in 1973, when, after ‘taking some kind of tablets’, he began to strip naked in the street right outside the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, believing himself to be safely at home. He was immediately arrested and manhandled by the authorities, who would drag him off to a psychiatric ward that was more a prison than a hospital, focused on confinement and punishment rather than palliative care. He would remain locked behind its walls until the following year.^[136]

 

This was a dramatic but ultimately atypical example. The other negative effects of his drug use were more insidious and slow to emerge. One of the most important things they took from him was the circle of hippies – Volosy – who had first given him a sense of place and community as a lost teenager. As he sombrely reflected, Volosy ultimately disbanded ‘because of drugs’. As he put it, ‘drugs spoil everyone’; ‘they can even turn a good person into shit’.^[137] By the late 1970s, he and Ofelia rarely socialised at all, only leaving their apartment ‘for drug stuff’.^[138] The narcotics therefore limited their everyday social sphere, even if they still managed to occasionally travel further afield, but that, too, was often motivated by their search for the poppy.

 

If he had used drugs to help overcome feelings of isolation and estrangement from the Soviet world, they would ultimately only exacerbate those very problems. While opium might allow him to open the doors of perception into other, more attractive realities, one of its costs was to render the non-kaif world even more mundane and unattractive. Compared to the rush of injecting or ingesting opiates, it could be difficult to find anything of interest in the ordinary world.^[139] If drug use had also given him a key to an underground subculture of colourful and extraordinary people, his opiate-induced reveries nevertheless remained intensely personal, inward affairs. Under their influence, the poppies adorning the fantastic worlds he transferred to the pages of his notebooks were the only companions he could take with him.

 

Although opium gave him experiences akin to the psychedelic states Western hippies enjoyed under LSD, mescaline and psilocybin mushrooms, at a certain point that similarity breaks down. In both cases, the body will build a tolerance to the drugs, meaning the dose must be increased to achieve the same effects if taken in a short time period. The crucial difference is that, with psychedelics, the building of tolerance does not go hand-in-hand with dependency: when a person stops taking psychedelics, they do not face the same gruelling experience of withdrawal as the opium user, who must endure an ordeal of intense pain and anxiety. Azazello would come to need at least some opium simply to feel normal.

 

In the end, Azazello’s relationship with opium mirrored De Quincey’s: ‘Opium was his curse, but it was also the crutch that enabled him to endure the self-inflicted chaos of his lifestyle, for which it was both the cause and the excuse’.^[140] All the same, it was alcohol rather than opium which he would blame for the end of his relationship with Ofelia, and which would ultimately come to control and ravage his life.

 

The Soviet state was always more concerned about alcohol than drug use, so it was a dark irony that Azazello would become a fully-fledged alcoholic while under the state’s ‘care’, confined to a psychiatric hospital in the mid-1980s to rehabilitate him from his drug use.^[141] As his social world began to disintegrate and he parted ways with Ofelia, Azazello became disenchanted with the opium explorations that had defined his life in the 1970s. Over time, as his increasing bondage to alcohol reveals, he largely sought to escape from his life, using drugs more as anaesthetic than muse.

 

 

Incomplete Integration

 

Azazello’s life is an extraordinary story, but despite the temporary relief and many important psychological benefits he gained from his journeys into the vibrant and often thrilling worlds induced by mind-altering substances, its tragic end is a powerful reminder that the greatest challenge was to carry these experiences of deep meaning back into the everyday world. Integrating the revealed, subjective ‘truths’ of psychedelic experience is a struggle in any society, whose cultural conventions are always challenged by alternative states of consciousness, but the burden of doing so in the Soviet Union was particularly heavy.

 

Because hippie life was always ultimately defined in opposition to the status quo, integration was, in a sense, impossible. At most, Azazello could hope to find some degree of self-acceptance, but the friction caused by being an outsider – even when worn as a badge of honour – continued to cause inescapable psychological pain.

 

Azazello and the Soviet hippies’ experience was unique in many ways, but is also at its heart a broader twentieth-century story. The rise of countercultural movements in the 1960s around the world expressed an intense desire to overcome the sense of spiritual impoverishment felt in the modern, industrialised world. But, during the Cold War and even today, exploring and embracing altered states of consciousness is considered to be a disruptive threat to social and political order.

 

Despite its ultimately tragic ending, Azazello’s unorthodox life reminds us that even under deeply repressive conditions there is always a possibility – to some extent – of carving out alternative experiences. This expression of cognitive liberty was not an unchanging state of vnye, but an active process of seeking alternative frameworks, from Buddhism to medieval fairytales, that, with the aid of visionary drugs, could provide more meaning and reassurance than the Soviet master narrative ever could.

 

Although, in the Cold War context, governments in both East and West considered mind-altering drugs and even hippiedom itself to be a serious threat, when we explore the personal stories of Azazello and those like him, we realise that their lifestyle choices were largely pursued for their own sake. When he set off aboard his opium rocket-ship into nebulous inner worlds, Azazello was driven by a quest for self-acceptance; he was not trying to reinvent the world, but to discover (and even befriend) himself.

 

Thanks to the burgeoning renaissance of scientific psychedelic research and new, more sympathetic approaches to addiction, we are able to appreciate and understand Azazello’s trips and experiences on their own terms, rather than view him, as the Soviet state did, as a washed-up and hopeless drug addict entering the zone of kaif merely to numb his pain. If we neglect to ask why someone takes a drug, we cannot understand the meaning and significance of the experience at all. Along with his artistic endeavours, these were genuine attempts to heal and make sense of himself and the world around him, providing him direct experience of the hippie tenets he sought to live his life by.

 

In his hands, the syringe was not merely an escape route, but a rocket-ship propelling him into confusing, challenging, but also profoundly liberating emotional landscapes. These hallucinatory vistas could feel more real to him than his ‘real life’, imbued with a sense of authenticity which he tried to capture in the pages of his notebooks as ‘freedom, love and needle’.