“Even as We Fall, We Hold Onto Our Flag”: Azazello as a Participant in a Social Movement

Azazello’s archive as a historical source for studying Soviet hippie communities

Representatives of the Soviet hippie subculture frequently argue about who does and who doesn’t have the right to consider him/herself a real hippie. The fact that Azazello was a real, old-school (oldovyi)[1] hippie, a dazzling representative of the Sistema,[2] one of its symbols and legends, has never been in doubt anywhere or by anyone. His legendary status was established by both the image of him (which is far removed from reality) created by Arkadii Rovner in his novel Kalalatsy, which was based on what Aleksandr Dvorkin told him,[3] by Dvorkin’s own memoirs,[4] the respectful but at the same time imprecise recollections of him in the memoirs of underground artist Nikita Alekseev,[5] and other, similar sources. We find an unexpectedly vivid description of Azazello in a sentimental essay published in LiveJournal in which the author—Oksana—recounts her meeting with Azazello in 1989, not long after he left the hospital where he had spent three years undergoing compulsory treatment:[6]

Since it sucks and it makes me sad—I’ll jump right into 1989. Then maybe I will fill in a hole. And bits and pieces like this.

I was a cute hippie girl in cut-off blue jeans with a white spot from battery acid, a white shirt with a blue Gauja blueberry stain.[7] I was standing on the Arbat with a sketchbook with monotypes. He was walking along the Arbat—right in the middle, as if he was on a string—with the floating gait of a lover of hallucinogens. He wasn’t even walking—the background was moving behind him—and in a flash—he’s leaning over the sketchbook: “Yours?”

I see someone with graying hair and the face of Mr. Designer,[8] and at the very same time—a ginger-haired apparition in bell-bottoms with designs painted on them and a colorful stovepipe hat. Half an hour later we’re already sitting on the floor (there’s nothing else to sit on) in his apartment, our hands full, as if we were holding cards, with drawings: I have his and he has mine.

His name is Azazello, he’s about thirty-five, it’s been three days since he left the clinic and he’s discovered that the world has shifted. He can’t deal with speech and music that’s too fast, but he goes from calm to action at lightning speed, like a snake on the attack. He’s dreaming about an injection. He’s been dreaming about it for almost two years, but he’s agreed to wait a bit longer. He draws—on the back of a postcard, between the lines of writing on the card, in the margins of newspapers, on napkins, on a package of Belomor [cigarettes]—with a pencil, a feather, a pen, a burnt match, a needle, using his own blood instead of ink from “control” … I can spend hours poring over his madness on scraps of paper while he smokes, chats, reads me his diaries. They are in English—I don’t know the language. He translates “The Wall” and “Jesus Christ” for me and teaches me how to roll a joint. I learn how to stop the “locomotive” with a glance. He has a nice, tired wife and an adopted daughter—a little mixed-race girl, about six years old.[9] One evening, we buy a bottle of Cyprian wine “for a last one” from the men unloading trucks at the Arbat department store and we drink it at a playground. It’s drizzling, the wine is dense and tastes of resin. It leaves an aftertaste and it’s the same kind of red color as the branches of the bushes around us. We don’t talk about anything, and we don’t do anything but that wine—it’s sweeter than anything I’ve ever drunk. If the telephone rings at three in the morning at the flat [flet] where I live—it’s Azazello. “Maybe I could read something to you about how my cat Moon died?” I hold the receiver to my ear with my shoulder for the next hour. I understand two words, “cat” and “moon.”

When they kick me out of the flat, I go to him. He listens, smiles in an off-putting way and very softly asks “Address?” and for a second, I feel like I’m Margarita, controlling a murderous demon and I don’t tell him the address.

I haven’t seen him in fifteen years.

30 May 2005

 

This sketch captures with surprising accuracy the magical impression that Azazello made with his appearance and the way he communicated.[10] Azazello’s membership in the community of hippies was specified primarily by his appearance, lifestyle, and subtle aspects of his behavior: beautiful long hair, handmade (samostrok) clothes decorated with recognizable symbols, rock music, creativity, partying, drugs, hitchhiking, unwillingness to work, a lack of money. He himself thought that hippism (khippizm) was his internal psychological essence:

 

The longer, the more I am convinced that hippies are the essence of a particular kind of human psyche. I’m simply a hippie and you can’t change me. I can’t disown myself.”[11]

 

And even a profession:

 

You know, a Canadian asked what my profession was. And he’d fought in Vietnam. He was here in the mid-90s. Profession… hmmm, what’s my profession? I told him that I’m a hippie. And he didn’t get it! He was from there and he didn’t get it! That was the problem.[12]

 

In Azazello’s notebooks, we find a drawing with text saying, “Hippy is not a fashion (although it also happens to be that), not a philosophical school of thought, and not a sociological concept, HIPPY is a person’s mental state, and it means only this and nothing else.”[13]

 

Az 04 (1977–1978), Img 23

 

But a question arises: Were these external, aesthetic manifestations enough to be a hippie in the late Soviet Union? In general, what does it mean to belong to the community of hippies? And does belonging to the community of hippies mean to participate in a social movement, to make an attempt to formulate some kind of a protest message for society? And if that’s the case, then what kind of a movement or message is this, how can we describe it, and how did Azazello’s participation in the movement manifest itself? “Even as we fall, we hold onto our flag,” he wrote several times in his poetry. What kind of a flag were he and his friends trying to hold on to?

Azazello’s personal archive will help us answer these questions. His notebooks, drawings, poetry, and prose are the rare case when a large body of ego-documents created in a marginalized socio-cultural milieu have been preserved. Azazello—in part voluntarily, in part involuntarily—belonged not to the successful part of the Sistema but instead to its “bottom.” He was one of those who argued with their parents, left home, resisted socialization, took drugs, got in trouble with the law, was sent to the psikhushka (psychiatric hospital) for compulsory treatment, didn’t get a higher education, didn’t want to work, didn’t know much about how to take care of and support anyone, not even their own families, and died young and often tragically—not a natural death—on the street.

In recent years, the history of the unofficial culture of the late Soviet period has been reflected with increasing frequency in memoirs. Nonetheless, documents created as the historical events of this period were unfolding—rather than at an interval of time providing historical distance—are scarce: correspondence, diaries, notebooks, autobiographies, creative materials, samizdat from the milieux of the cultural underground, the counterculture, Soviet bohemia, hippies, the rock music underground, mystics, the mentally ill, black marketeers, prostitutes, and the like. Ego-documents originating from the milieux of the marginalized are a rare and valuable find for historians. People living in those circumstances did not always understand or did not immediately recognize their connection with a larger history and the importance of their testimony and creative legacy. They often lived asocial lives and died young; whatever they had managed to preserve was frequently lost during extreme moments of history and daily life. Despite this, the marginal environment fostered unusually intense friendships, thanks to which several rather large collections of personal documents of the socio-cultural marginals of the 1970s and 1980s were preserved and made accessible to historians.

None of the Russian state archives holds any significant fonds which could be used to study the Soviet cultural underground and the social phenomena associated with it. As a rule, representatives of the state did not see it as a cultural phenomenon or a social movement whose historical memory was worth preserving. Instead, it was seen as a dangerous social deviation from the norm whose members were parasites, drug addicts, etc. and, as such, it was recorded in documents generated by official organizations and the punitive organs. The People’s Archive (Tsentr Dokumentatsii “Narodnyi Arkhiv”) was the only place where the question of appropriate preservation of the archives of marginalized people was raised. The sad fate of this forward-thinking institution led us, historians and archivists, to conclude that today documents about the history of such people are probably no longer of interest to anyone in Russia.

The directors of Western archives turned out to be more perceptive and tolerant. In recent years, historian Juliane Fürst’s advocacy and commitment led the Wende Museum (in Los Angeles, USA) to augment its collections with the personal archives of Petersburg hippie Gena Zaitsev (1954–) and clothing designed by hippie fashion designer Dzen Baptist (Vladimir Teplyshev, 1949–2009) as well as copies of the archive of Iura Solntse (Iurii Burakov, 1949–1993), the legendary founder of the Sistema, and a wealth of other documents, photographs, samizdat, and artifacts of Soviet hippies. The archive of the Research Centre for the Study of Eastern European Studies at the University of Bremen also holds archival fonds on the history of the Soviet-era cultural underground. Even against this backdrop, Azazello’s archive is unique in its concentration of ego-documents and thus, potential sources for studying subjectivity during the late Soviet years.

 

“Political” Azazello

The contents of Azazello’s notebooks, the interweaving of diary entries with drawings, his poetry, and that of others, resemble the ego-documents of the Czech underground described by Michael Kilburn. Signature elements of these sources are the “diary style,”[14] the attention paid to “minor daily events and fleeting emotions,” and the poetics of the “spontaneous fixation of reality.” As Kilburn puts it, in such sources, “deprived of functionality, in the works of the underground ordinary events become radiant with the luminous light of hidden possibilities, ‘repressed identity and dignity.’”[15]

 

Transparent folder (Prozrachnaia papka), Img 01

 

Therefore, it is not surprising that there are only a few, random explicit statements on the topic of Soviet society and politics in Azazello’s documents. For example, he:

• contemptuously used to call the USSR “Sovietdom” (Sovdepiia),[16] sometimes he played with the language of Soviet propaganda ironically in his texts and drawings, used snippets from Soviet newspapers to make his collages;[17]
• occasionally used people’s names, concepts, or the names of organizations which refer to history, ideology, and politics;
• explicitly declared his commitment to pacifism and anarchism;[18]
• Azazello’s “civic lyric poetry” (grazhdanskaia lirika), the few poems he wrote with obvious socio-political overtones, is deliberately careless and it describes Russia as a bleak, cold space that is estranged from all that is human and as unfit for life;[19]
• wrote an entire manifesto with elements of fantasy.[20]

 

Red folder (Krasnaia papka), Img 07

 

Azazello spoke much more frequently about ideology and politics in his interviews than in his texts, apparently because, this topic became more relevant for him as he grew older. For example, he talked about the active part he played in the defense of the White House on 19–21 August 1991 (“it was already horribly brazen when they came with the tanks”),[21] his negative attitude toward Putin’s regime, and his disappointment in the hippies who supported the 2014 annexation of Crimea and thought Russian aggression in Ukraine was justified.

In personal communications (2015–2016), Azazello spoke even more frequently and enthusiastically about politics. He listed to Ekho Moskvy,[22] read Novaia gazeta, which he often spent his last bit of money to buy or simply cadged it at kiosks and, on his initiative, we always talked over the political news and his acquaintances’ political views. When I went to see him on 21 May 2015 to help him replace his lost passport, he told me that on the news on Ekho they had just reported on the booing of writer Nikolai Starikov at the Russian State University for the Humanities (RGGU)[23], and he asked me to give his respects to those of my colleagues who had obstructed the propagandist. He was concerned about Ukrainian pilot Nadia Savchenko when she was jailed;[24] I bought him felt-tip markers for fabric: he wanted to go to the 1 June 2016 hippies’ meeting at Tsaritsyno in a T-shirt with a text condemning Russian intervention in the war in Ukraine.

Azazello’s position was notably different from the Soviet cultural underground’s characteristic belief that “politics is dirt.”[25] At the same time, professing their apoliticism, hippies as a rule tend to believe that during the Soviet period the state feared them even more than the dissidents and they think the Soviet system collapsed precisely because of them.

 

The mythology of the history of the Soviet hippie movement

Given the clear paucity of Azazello’s explicitly ideological and political statements about his social position in the 1970s and 1980s, we can get a sense of his social position from indirect data. These include the symbols he used most frequently, slang, instances of symbolic behavior, the semantics of his daily life, his personal mythology, and mythological statements about the community to which he belonged as well as statements on the history of this community. In addition, Azazello’s comments about society and politics—which are scattered through various books and coded in drawings and poems, and, when taken out of their context, are intentionally unclear—call for the use of other historical sources to clarify the socio-political meanings of his biography. For our purposes, these types of supplementary sources are the ego-documents of his friends and acquaintances in the “Sistema.”

From the second half of the 1970s to the beginning of the 1980s, Azazello and others of his generation had a particularly acute sense of belonging to a movement whose meaning was yet to be elucidated.[26] He and his close friends—Ofeliia (Svetlana Barabash, 1950–1991), Il’ia Kestner (1954–), Sergei Troianskii (1954–2007?), Diversant—Iurii Popov (1954–1999), Shamil’—Samuil Valiev (1957–2006), and Guru (Arkadii Slavorosov, 1957–2005)—discussed this issue, talking over the movement’s possible social meanings, creatively playing with them, and performatively reproducing them.

Azazllo often discussed the Sistema’s history and values with Ofeliia, his girlfriend and later wife. Ofeliia was considered the Moscow Sistema’s most influential and innovative thinker. In the mid-1970s, she and her close friends called themselves the Hair group (gruppa Volosy). Their conversations recorded, discussed, and mythologized the major events of the social life of the Soviet hippies of the 1970s: the demonstration of 1 June 1971 that almost but didn’t actually happen, which became legendary after the authorities thwarted it by detaining the people who had met up to take part in it; the Hair group’s performances, its participation in at the exhibition at the House of Culture at the VDNKh (Exhibition of the Achievements of the National Economy) in September 1975, Iura Diversant’s leaflets and protest actions, the hippies’ unofficial art exhibitions, the history of foreign hippie movements, etc. In the history of the countercultural youth movement, other cities saw similar events, protests, and demonstrations of varying degrees of spontaneity, whose mythological traces were much stronger than their actual content as protest.

For Azazello’s close friend Iura Diversant, the idea of hippism as a movement was very important: he saw it as “a Movement [he wrote this word with a capital letter] of young people for Peace, Freedom, against violence,” whose goal was not just to preserve itself and its values in a narrow circle but to change society. At the end of the 1980s, he attempted to create his own chronology of the Soviet hippie movement, dating 1 June 1971, the day of that same demonstration, as its beginning. Another of Azazello and Ofeliia’s acquaintances, Sergei Batovrin (1957–), who initiated a Soviet grassroots peace movement, considered the history of Soviet hippies a part of the history of the grassroots pacifist movement in the USSR. In the fact sheet “Group for the establishment of trust: 3 years of peaceful activity,” which he compiled in the mid-1980s, the “antiwar demonstrations” of hippies which took place on 1 June in Tsaritsyno Park and the “meetings” (mitingi) in memory of John Lennon held in December in the Lenin Hills beginning in 1980 were included as part of the movement.[27]

Although echoes of these events found their way into human rights publications like the Chronicle of Current Events and News from the USSR, almost all of them were more like spontaneous demonstrations, unsupported by an organized group or a carefully developed ideology. The Soviet hippie scene (tusovka) was a movement only in the imagination of its individual and rare representatives, people who were passionate about ideologically informed creative work and were interested in politics.

 

The peace sign as the most important symbol of the Soviet hippie movement

In these circumstances, one way to gauge community members’ ideas about society is to look at the symbolism of their visual self-representations and behavior. The peace sign was the most important symbol for hippies. Along with long hair, this particular sign became the symbol of belonging to the hippie community in the USSR. In Azazello’s drawings of the early period, roughly speaking before the early 1980s, there are a truly enormous number of peace signs.

 

Az 08 (1976), Img 6

 

Azazello’s drawings are most often fancifully transformed images of himself—long-haired with a wise half-smile, shouting or lost in his thoughts, walking along the road. Less often, he is running or riding a horse, dressed in beautifully styled, free-flowing hippie clothing, fantastical headdresses, the armor of a medieval knight, or a fairy-tale traveler’s camisole. The peace sign could be painted on the forehead, the temples, cheek, or chin, it adorns hair and hats (sometimes a jester’s cap), it becomes a keychain or a pendant on a chain, it’s embroidered on a hippie shirt, on the front or on the sleeve like a chevron, it’s everywhere on bell-bottom jeans. It can also be found on the sails of a ship traveling to an unknown land, on the walls of castles and houses, in whimsical flourishes (vignettes), as a weathervane on the roof of a castle, floating in the air, combined with hearts, flowers (or drawn in the center of a flower), poppy flowers and heads, syringes, and the Maltese cross.

 

Az 11 (1976–1977), Img 07

 

Az 09 (1977), Img 06

 

Az 06 (1977), Img 04

 

Photos. Img 0362

 

This seemingly well-known symbol is not as simple as it seems, especially in the Soviet context.

The peace sign (in Russian, “patsifik,” which comes from the English word “pacific,” meaning “making or tending to the making of peace”), the international symbol of peace and the antiwar movement, was created in 1958 by Gerald Holtom for the British organization the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). The sign was initially used at anti-nuclear and antiwar demonstrations but at the end of the 1960s Western hippies adopted it.[28]

Despite its positive attitude to Western peace activists, in official Soviet culture the peace sign was almost never used. For the most part, respectable Soviet citizens could see this sign in photographs and on TV reports about the Western peace movement, which the Soviet government supported and used for propaganda purposes. For example, when I was a child, this sign appeared in photographs in Pravda and Za rubezhom, newspapers that my family subscribed to. Leningrad hippies Gena and Volodia Zaitsev collected clippings with peace signs from Soviet newspapers.[29] This sign was accordingly associated with positive values but also with something other, foreign, with Western but not Soviet protest culture. The average Soviet person didn’t know much about it and could even confuse it with other signs, for example, the swastika, or could mistake it for “propaganda for atomic weapons.”[30]

Soviet youth of the underground adopted this sign and called it the “patsifik.” As Evgenii Sadkov writes, “Against the backdrop of mummified official symbols and people, it was a little ray of light in a dark kingdom. And it began to appear diffidently on walls and on student jackets. The real tour de force of that time was the appearance of the corresponding tattoo on the shoulder. You could hang out with a dude like that.”[31] At the end of the 1960s and in early 1970s, Soviet hippies made this sign their own.

One of the first pieces of evidence of the use of this symbol dates from 1970 and belongs to the musician Andrei Makarevich: “Sveta, the wife of hippie artist Sasha, made some pants for me. They lived on Shcherbakovskaia, they were directly connected with the Sistema, which raised them to unattainable heights in my eyes. There were always some hippies at their apartment, which was painted with flowers and peace signs: someone was spending the night, someone was playing the guitar, someone was pontificating about Buddhism. It looked like a real commune.”[32] The first Lviv hippies in a photograph probably taken on 31 August 1970 are sitting in Lychakiv cemetery near a wall with a peace sign painted on it and “flower power,” “free love,” “make love not war,” “mir” (the Russian word for peace) and “pust’ vsedga budet solntse” (may there always be sunshine) written on it.[33] Shekspir’s hippie pants with peace signs, sewn circa 1971–1973, are part of the collection of hippie clothes at the Wende Museum in Los Angeles.[34]

It was drawn on the body, sewed on clothing, bags, and ksivniki (small bags hanging from a ribbon or string around the neck, used to hold a passport), used on jewelry (pendants, bracelets, love beads), painted on fences and walls at traditional hippie hangouts. They drew it on asphalt and applied it widely as a design element in hippie flats, summer camps, and “communes,” as decoration for flags, posters, and samizdat and as a personal sign in correspondence. The sign was frequently used in conjunction with the slogan “Make Love Not War.” References to the popularity of the sign can also be found in memoirs written by members of the cultural underground, not only hippies but also people in the rock music movement.

In her dictionary of Soviet hippie slang, Tat’iana Shchepanskaia introduces the word “patsifik” (peace sign) into a cluster of concepts connected with pacifism:

PATs, m.

1. Pacifist (Patsifist)
2. Referring to a pacifist, hippies on the side of punks, metalheads and other non-pacifists

PATsIFIK, m.

1. Symbol of the movement for peace and nonviolence—the image of a dove’s foot in a circle
2. Badge with the image of this symbol

PATsIFIST, m. A person who adheres to the ideals of nonviolence, peace.[35]

 

Other dictionaries give similar meanings. Thus, the peace sign symbolized a commitment to the ideals of nonviolence. Unlike many other countercultural communities, “withdrawal from the zone of violence,” “consistent tabooing of violence and aggression in all its manifestations,” and “proclaiming pacifism as an ideology and the practice of nonviolence as the most important element of their identity” were all typical of hippies.[36]

The ironic use of this sign and the not infrequent appearance of the peace sign in nonpeaceful contexts indicates that this sign could mean something else and something other than a commitment to the ideals of peace and nonviolence.

An ironic attitude toward pacifism showed up in hippie folklore and in playful ways.[37] Anecdotes about the peace sign and hippies’ pacifism cultivated among the hippies themselves, include topics like “dodging” (otkos) the army, uncovering the brutality and aggressiveness of “pacifists,” and using the “peace sign” as a weapon;[38] the very appearance of the word “pacifize” (patsifizdit’, meaning izbivat’, to beat severely) indicates that nonviolence was not an absolute value for this community.[39]

In the late Soviet cultural underground, the peace sign was often used in combination with other signs, which transformed its symbolic message into an oxymoron, making it meaningless. For example, I. Smirnov’s semi-underground left-wing radical group, Antares (1975), used the peace sign but at the same time, its members were “enthusiastic about Che Guevara, the Red Brigades, and the Rote Armee Fraktion.”[40]

A vivid example of the appearance of the peace sign in ideological contexts that were far from peaceful is the case of Viacheslav Eres’ko (1949–2001), the first Lviv hippie, who used the peace sign simultaneously with the Nazi swastika, the biker skull and crossbones, and the Ukrainian trident. For him, all symbols had, above all, anti-Soviet meaning. [41] When Eres’ko was arrested, a search of his apartment turned up an “anti-Soviet” manifesto, Nazi insignia, peace signs, and weapons.[42]

 

Az 03 (1979–1980), Img 15

 

Domestic violence was not uncommon among Soviet hippies. Azazello, it turns out, used to beat Ofeliia and, later, his daughter’s mother.[43] He didn’t notice any special contradictions between violence and his “professional” hippism. It’s also noteworthy that the nickname of “Azazello” has a fairy-tale, almost accidental character (when he was first called Azazello, he hadn’t even read The Master and Margarita). Neither short nor having “the physiognomy of a blackguard,” the only thing Azazello had in common with Bulgakov’s Azazello was his red hair. He did not see any contradiction between the image of Azazello in the novel, which was associated with violence and murder, and the hippie image; more important to him were the beautiful, mysterious, infernal sound of the name, the reference to other worlds, and the semi-underground literary tradition.

Similar facts do not allow us to believe that in the late Soviet cultural underground the peace sign was a sign of conscious acceptance of the values of nonviolence or, to an even greater extent, participation in the peace or pacifist movement. Andrei Madison called the hippies whom he used to meet at the summer camps in Gauja (Latvia) peace-sign wearers (patsifikonostsy),[44] implying that they were not actually pacifists (patsifisty) and for many people who wore this ornament, the peace sign was just a tribute to fashion; few used it meaningfully and were ready to openly proclaim, defend, and if necessary, suffer for their convictions.

Also noteworthy is the not infrequent use of the peace sign with an inevitable displacement of its meaning in communities which were close to hippies, for example, rock musicians and people involved in semi-underground religious youth circles. Sandr Riga (1939–), the founder of an underground Christian community, and his friends gave the peace symbol an ecumenical meaning. For them it was a symbol of the religious unity of humanity: three roads converge in one path to God. When Sandr became a victim of punitive psychiatry, to defend him, international religious and human rights organizations distributed postcards with a photograph of him wearing a sweater with a small badge with a peace sign on it.[45]

The peace sign could be found on the gasoline tank of the motorcycle belonging to the leader of the Lviv motohippies (hippie-bikers), Penzel’ (1949–), who, in terms of his appearance and behavior, was utterly non-Soviet, indeed detached from Soviet reality. His appearance was so hard-boiled (with long, tangled hair, a bushy beard, and shabby, retro-style clothes, he looked like a cowboy from the Wild West) that drivers were afraid to pick him up when he was hitchhiking. At the same time, Penzel’ genuinely considered himself a pacifist. During those years, he was friends with an absolute pacifist, Lviv hippie-Tolstoyan A. Lobachev (1953–2011), but he defined his own pacifism in an unconventional way: “I’m a pacifist … like Jesus Christ … I don’t like to submit.”[46]

The Soviet mystical underground also used this sign as a symbol of membership in their community. We learn of this from Andrei Oleinikov’s (Alkhimik) memoirs. Oleinikov (1958–) was a hippie and one of Daniil Andreev’s disciples. He talks about how, at the end of the 1970s, in Leningrad his friends found the way to an underground esoteric apartment by following a chain of secret peace signs.[47]

Thus, in the late Soviet cultural underground, the peace sign had an additional meaning: it was more a sign of their autonomy, exclusion from Soviet space, and membership in an independent, closed, and secret space, a brotherhood of the initiated, than a mark of the consciously chosen social ideal of nonviolence. In this sense, the pacifist message to society in its very best incarnation can be read in a drawing done by Pessimist (Aleksandr Vial’tsev, 1962–) in a psychiatric hospital in 1982: in it is depicted a postage stamp with the peace sign and the words “Peace and Freedom,” “Fuck you all,” and “Post United States of Love.”[48] A little earlier, in 1980, the group Mukhomor used their bodies to make the word “KhYI” in the snow at the Kuskovo estate. In the group of people who took part in the action, the person on the far left is wearing a sweatshirt with a peace sign on it. To send the Soviet regime or even “normal” society as a whole a few letters—this was the initial impetus of the hippie movement and, more broadly, of the entire cultural underground.

In the mid-1990s, Azazello wrote in one of his “notebooks”: “When I have time, where is that? I’ll have to, chew over the pacifism of Russian hippies, interestingly, I experienced it on my own skin, poor thing-g-g-g-g-g-a-a-aaa-ii etc., etc.”[49]

 

Different envelopes (Raznye konverty), Img 13

 

Nonviolence as an ideal of Soviet hippies

As a rule, hippies became a certain kind of people who were kind and gentle by nature, “we didn’t know how to fight and we didn’t like to.”[50] In the milieu of the cultural underground, pacifism as personal ethics, a person’s own, principled moral choice, was widespread. The Sistema’s pacifism was expressed in a particular style of personal behavior, conversations about nonviolence,[51] creativity in the visual arts and songwriting, reading pacifist literature, unwillingness to perform military service, and a commitment to vegetarianism.

Refusing to serve in the army was one of the main manifestations of hippie pacifism. Stories about how one hippie or another avoided conscription by being in a psychiatric hospital and receiving a diagnosis which exempted him from military service are an important part of Soviet-era hippies’ self-descriptions, which it could be said, has already been turned into an anecdote.[52] As Mariia Remizova (1961–) writes, “Stories about the loony bin and getting a mental health clause [a mental-health exemption] were very widespread in the hippie milieu and were quite successful since they touched on the most burning topic.”[53]

Typically, when refusing to serve in the army, Soviet hippies never spoke openly about their pacifism. Instead of direct refusals while declaring their principles, like the Tolstoyans of the first third of the twentieth century, these were “evasions”: “Hip-culture worked out a lot of adaptations—ways of doing things and material conditions—making it possible to fake your way out of the army (to avoid being drafted and dodge it for long time).”[54] Only a few of them were interested in the history of the conscientious objectors’ movement and the issue of performing alternative civilian service.

Azazello took the standard route: he got a diagnosis which he had to periodically reconfirm at “the commission.” In his notebooks we find fragments of pacifist slogans and verses which became particularly numerous during the period when the “recommission” threatened him:[55] “Make Love Not War,” “destruction of weapons” (with a drawing of a hippie destroying a rocket), “He did not want to go to war, they had already sewn a uniform for him, he said ‘I don’t want to kill people,’ anyone then they killed him.”[56]

 

 

Az 04 (1977–1978), Img 20

 

Az 04 (1977–1978), Img 22

 

Another hippie “pacifist” practice was vegetarianism, which was not long lasting in most cases and not infrequently could be associated with immersion in religious studies in the spirit of the New Age movement. Azazello was a vegetarian at the end of the 1970s and during the early 1980s (for about six years).[57]

Against this backdrop, hippies’ virtually complete absence from any public pacifist actions is striking, even though the militarized Soviet state provided more than enough reasons to protest. As was mentioned above, on 1 June 1971, the Day of Defense of Children, Moscow hippies attempted to carry out a demonstration against the Vietnam War with antiwar slogans. On one hand, this looks like a direct imitation of American hippies. On the other hand, some people interpret this action as anti-American, and they insist that the idea of holding a demonstration was a KGB provocation.[58]

Rumors around this story multiplied almost immediately, and, in the recollections of participants and their contemporaries, it became a legend.[59] In the absence of documents in the state archives which could confirm or deny the fact of provocation and could also provide reliable information about which slogans were supposed to accompany the demonstration, we can only state that, despite all their escapism, at that time Soviet hippies felt the need to speak out about themselves and their values in public space. This need was retained by individual members of the Sistema, even at a later time. It was not by chance that Azazello’s friends Diversant and Troianskii reminisced about this failed demonstration as a great event, the highest manifestation of the Sistema as a movement.[60]

Other well-known actions of Soviet hippies which were pacifist in spirit are the demonstration of an anti-border flag at the unofficial artists’ exhibition at House of Culture at the VDNKh in September 1975, the symbolically important September 1978 mass pilgrimage to Yasnaya Polyana for Tolstoy’s jubilee, and some carnival processions and performances in various cities. Azazello did not participate in these events, but he had detailed knowledge of the history of the 1971 demonstration and the brouhaha about the flag at the exhibition. These were the most important subjects of the community’s mythology, which were recounted to him repeatedly by a direct participant—Ofeliia.

Hippie manifestos in which the ideal of nonviolence would be mentioned became popular only during perestroika. Before that, pacifist leaflets, declarations, and manifestos came almost exclusively from Diversant and Troianskii’s circle. The manifesto written by Azazello himself dates to approximately 1980–1981:[61]

 

AZ

THE RAINBOW PARADE continues. And we come together again.

WE ARE H I P P I E S.

There was a moment and I thought the strongest ones remained:

We with a brain woven from the flames of the Sun and crystals of ice

We with eyes that span every horizon;

We with a heart pouring out Love and Peace;

We with lips sparkling with laughter;

We with long hair that winds around the entire world.

Flowers scattered across the light, dispelling darkness, like stars at night.

The darkness was advancing—they were uprooting and trampling us, they were beating, taunting and destroying, driving some mad. I saw broken flowers: empty eyes, fear-stricken faces, hands falling powerlessly.

But we come together again, because we have something to say to each other with words, music, dance or just a smile. We, hippies are makers and creators of the New Spirit which we convey in drawings and painting, poetry and prose, in music, songs and dance, in clothing and jewelry, in relationships with each other and with the society of Adults.[62]

We want to see ourselves united by a creative force focused on the creation of a Luminous space, encompassing our Soul and Reason. We want our relationships with each other to be pure, without insincerities, lies and innuendo. Sincerity is the linchpin of our relationships.

Each of us is the bearer of fire. Someone’s flame is brighter, someone else’s is not very bright, someone knows absolutely nothing about this and it’s all right, but he still has a spark. We want to join our fires, sparks and torches—this will be the Flame, a Conflagration, the spark of a Supernova, and it will not be isolated sparks. The light of our Flame will banish the Darkness from our space, will purify us and will give us ourselves.

As before, we renounce violence and intolerance, conformism, hypocrisy, slander and the other nasty things, on which Adults try raise others to be like them. This is not for us. We choose a smile, not a stone, a flower—and not a machine, we choose Freedom, Love and Peace. Therefore we are together always.

 

Yes, we come together again and say—

ANTIMILITARISM IS THE FOUNDATION OF LIFE,

PEACE ON THE PLANET IS OUR SOIL

FREEDOM IS OUR SKY,

LOVE IS A GENTLE RAIN WHICH PULLS US UPWARD,

JOINING PEACE AND FREEDOM.

The Rainbow parade continues!

We are hippies

Even as we fall, we hold onto our flag.[63]

 

Az 23 (1980–1981), Img 41

 

Thus, the simplest words are written on the banner of the community in whose name Azazello spoke: freedom, peace, and love. And the community’s protest was addressed to hypocritical adults, which is quite odd, unexpectedly infantile for the young twenty-something that Azazello was when he wrote the manifesto. The use of the pronoun “we” in both this manifesto and in several of Azazello’s poems from that period stands out (as he himself recounted in an interview, in his creative work he was moving away from collectivism toward individualism: at first, “we,” then, more and more, “I”).[64] The perception of the hippies’ relationship with the adult world as the struggle of light and darkness is also noteworthy.

 

Az 09 (1977), Img 7

 

In many ways, these texts correspond to the imagery in Azazello’s drawings, where one often sees the sun, longhaired hippie-wanderers in fanciful clothes, the skyline and a hippie figure (recognizably Azazello) moving towards it, and magical animals, castles, inhabitants of other planets, and other attributes of a different, fantastical, alternative world.[65]

 

 

 

23 (1980–1981), Img 33

 

23 (1980–1981), Img 19

 

 

 

23 (1980–1981), Img 18

 

23 (1980–1981), Img 21

 

Big envelope (Bol’shoi konvert), Img 070

The artistic form of Azazello’s manifesto, its abundance of metaphors, the absence of political content, and the presence of common places and symbols connected with hippie mythology and Azazello’s personal mythology make Azazello’s manifesto different from other hippies’ ideological work.[66] In his notebooks, there are rough drafts of this manifesto as well as a poem with very similar contents, dating to the early 1990s, which expresses the feeling that the movement had been defeated (“and then I threw myself under a tank”). In the notebooks, there is also a fragment on the topic of the manifesto entitled “We will walk along the horizon!”:

 

 

 

23 (1980–1981), Img 20

 

Big envelope (Bol’shoi konvert), Img 074

The phrase “even as we fall, we hold onto our flag” is repeated several times in Azazello’s notebooks (for example, in the poem “I am looking at a flower blooming”)[67] and is accompanied by drawings of a road, a battle, and hippies using syringes as weapons.[68]

 

23 (1980–1981), Img 37

 

The pacifism of Soviet hippies as the symbolic renunciation of citizenship

“The Lord is our fortress, he will not betray us”—this phrase, a free improvisation on a theme in the psalms, is found frequently in Azazello’s notebooks.[69] He borrowed it from Iura Diversant. The hippies’ desire to fence themselves off from the world, to take refuge in their own autonomous space, to have the least possible contact with “sovdepia,” is well expressed in a poem of unknown authorship and origin, which was popular with Soviet hippies:

 

These clean and pure dirty hippies

Live in a white circle under an old lime tree

They drew this circle and they said:

This is our country without glass and steel.

Without police, theft, murders and deception,

And without hounding the desperate junkie.

Without philistinism, gold, careerism,

No “general elections” and no fascism.

Without war and armies, without “Hiroshima”—

We don’t want all this filth.

This is our country of Love and Hope

Of dreams, flowers and white clothes.

Of rock music, long hair and jeans,

Of sun, rustling leaves and jeeps.

Of grass and sky, the springtime forest—

In this country of ours all the wretched have a place.

But people came in cars with grilles,

They were in uniform and smelled of meat and vodka.

The hippies welcomed them with wildflowers,

They invited them in, asking, “Will you be with us?”

“We’re coming for you!,” they tied them up, rounded them up like flies

And sent them and the flowers off to the loony bin.[70]

 

The most radical expression of such a need for autonomy might be the desire to renounce one’s Soviet citizenship. A key concept for Soviet hippies was the idea of “inscribed/uninscribed” (vpisannost’/nevpisannost’)—a “general non-entry into reality,” a “decisive and principled noncitizenship” (okonchatel’noe i printsipial’noe negrazhdanstvo).[71]

Emigration sentiments were widespread in the informal communities of late socialism. They were characteristic of the cultural underground, the youth counterculture, the occult underground, and religious and national minorities. Among hippies and other members of the cultural underground there were many emigrants and “escapees” (pobegushniki), as people who were unable to emigrate from the USSR legally but tried to cross the border illegally were called in late Soviet times. They stubbornly strove to make their way to their “imagined West” or equally imagined East—to San Francisco, Kathmandu, and the like, and there were those who went missing while crossing a border or landed in jail.

For Ofeliia, Azazello’s girlfriend, cosmopolitanism, overcoming borders, and emigration were also important topics. The Hair group participated in unofficial art exhibitions, including the one at the House of Culture at the VDNKh in September 1975. Of the artwork exhibited by the hippies, everyone remembered one piece: a flag Ofeliia made using appliques and embroidery, with large, colored slogans, “Make Hair Everywhere,” and “Mir bez granits” (World without boundaries),[72] which had a peace sign and a globe pricked by a syringe. This flag seemed un-Soviet to the official organizers of the exhibition, and they excluded it from the exposition.[73] Later, “anti-border” sentiments would be a major part of the independent peace movement in the USSR.

Azazello was well acquainted with the history of the flag, although he himself didn’t participate in this exhibition. Since childhood he had been intensely interested in geography, in far-off countries, an interest that even his schoolteachers had noticed and appreciated.[74] This fascination might have been the flip side of his aversion for Soviet reality (“when you’re [a] stranger everywhere”).[75]

Azazello and Ofeliia wanted very much to leave the country. In their efforts to do so, Azazello even decided to make a fictive marriage and change his surname but when his application for an exit visa was denied, emigration became impossible. He, however, did not join the refusenik movement. Instead, he could be described as continuing to live in a state of “internal emigration” typical of the Soviet cultural underground.

 

The playful utopianism of the Soviet cultural underground

The desire to emigrate when it was impossible to do so gave birth to the phenomenon of “internal emigration,” “a passive confrontation with the state system evoked by disagreement with the dominant ideology and the inability or unwillingness to leave for a permanent place of residence in other countries.”[76] One manifestation of “internal emigration” was the construction of imaginary worlds and playful utopianism, which was widespread in the Soviet cultural-underground milieu.

As early as the 1950s, the so-called “shtatniki” (which could be roughly translated as “staters”) appeared in the USSR, “that is fans of everything ‘the states,’ made in the US.” In Aleksei Kozlov’s memoirs, several “shtatniki” just liked American consumer goods, but there were also those who stood out because of their “way of thinking”: “this was the circle of the real ‘shtatniki,’ people mentally living in the States, thinking of themselves as though they were Americans who happened to have been born here.”[77] Later, a similar psychological mechanism led to the emergence of the Indianist movement.

Fantasies and games about imaginary countries were common in the cultural underground of the late Soviet period. This phenomenon was a specific type of playful utopianism, which was widespread in the late Soviet period. It was a stereotyped form of behavior in the twentieth-century cultural and political underground which had analogies with children’s subcultures (games of “dreamland”),[78] youth communities, and the secret circles of the nineteenth century.

In the late Soviet period, similar “playful” institutions, circles, joke institutions, and playful projects also emerged from time to time in “serious” “adult” communities, often those associated with the underground. In 1969, Leningrad hippie Vladimir Zaitsev wrote in his diary, “I understood that this world is false, and the world of Strawberry fields is the real one. That is how the motto ‘Down with reality’ [Doloi real’nost’] came to be. To run away from this absurd reality into myself, into ourselves—our own—fields. I thought only there can we be happy and free.” Later he saw associations between imaginary world he had invented and the world that John and Yoko were talking about in their Declaration of Nutopia.[79]

The “most golden dream” of Grodno hippies was to buy Castle Hill (or Zamkovaia Gora, an area in the center of Grodno where the Old and New Castles are located), to declare an independent state there—and to have “neither communism nor socialism but instead a normal free country, without idiocy.” They also dreamed of “collecting money, leaving for Siberia, buying axes and nails, going down the river deep into the taiga, where Soviet power had not reached, building a monastery, and living there in accordance with their worldview, freely. The only question was ‘How can we listen to music, where are we going to get batteries for our Radio receivers?’”[80]

In Lviv, from 1968 until the early 1980s, countercultural youth played at living in the imaginary republic of the Holy Garden (Sviatyi Sad), which was on the grounds of an abandoned monastery of the Discalced (Barefoot) Carmelites. After studying at the same school in the mid-1970s, the future Mukhomors[81] created the Union of Northern Parties, the Union of Itelmen Policemen, the All-Kariak International, and the Union of Genius Generals. They parodied the Twenty-fifth KPSS Congress and held regular congresses, extramural sessions, and things like that.[82] In these imaginary countries and republics, constitutions were adopted, presidents were elected, governments were appointed, and coats of arms, flags, and national anthems parodying the Soviet Union, or even anti-Soviet variants, were created.

Playful utopianism aimed to construct alternative ideological, religious, and existential realities. At its foundation was a mechanism for symbolically renouncing Soviet citizenship. Slang, hippie nicknames, the names of their communes (the Yellow Submarine commune, Villa Peace Sign, and Walden), and the symbols which adorned their hair and clothing were also imbued with references to another reality—geographical, artistic, religious. But only in rare cases did similar hippie utopias lead young people into politics, as happened, for example, to Vyacheslav Demin (1960–) in the early 1980s.[83]

“And now you and I are going to gallop into a fairy tale” (A seichas my s toboi poskachem v skazku)

[image missing]

12 (1976–1977), Img 77

 

Azazello’s themes of an escape from reality, imagination, dreams, play, and fairy tales are reflected in his drawings, poetry, and other writings.[84] Azazello’s imaginary country had several faces and names, and he devoted most of his drawings, poetry, and fairy tales to it; he created it most often in solitude and didn’t tell anyone much about it. Only for a short time, in the mid-1970s, when he was living with Il’ia Kestner in the same building that housed Café Babylon (the unofficial name of the cult hangout Café Aromat), did Azazello participate in collective artistic and ideological work and discuss his ideas in a close circle of friends. Kestner’s and Azazello’s photo archives attest to the fact that during this very same period the theatricalization of daily life was typical for the group: they dressed up in elaborate costumes and acted out fantastical plots—for themselves, just for fun.[85]

Between 1974 and early 1976, Azazello and Il’ia spoke a great deal about the Sistema, and they tried to formulate its “ideas.” Having gotten ahold of a typewriter, they began to compose “fairy tales” (skazki) whose plots seemed to them to be allegorically associated with the ideas of hippism. I’lia Kestner recalled that when he met Azazello, he himself was trying to write and Azazello was drawing: “And to make a long story short, I suggested to him: let’s write something together. We wrote it, and I said, to be on the safe side, let’s just make it a fairy tale, but we’ll move the ideas of hippism into it. And so we typed: first he typed, then I did, on the same typewriter.”[86] As time went on, “other long-haired people” joined in, “a kind of a club took shape which a lot of people passed through.”[87]

Azazello and Kestner’s collaboration resulted in “a series of fairy tales about the country of Happiness,” which became a hippie manifesto.[88] They signed the fairy tales with made-up names. In the first part, “A Wanderer’s Lilac Mists” (“The Road to the Land of Happiness”) tells how a happy young man lived in the indescribably beautiful land of Happiness, in the valley of the Lilac Mists. One day evil people attacked this country, and it became desolate. Trees and plants and every other living thing died, it became difficult to breathe, and the valley went up in flames. The young man left the country and became a Wanderer. He sought his valley of lilac mists and visited many countries, but he didn’t find it anywhere. He became friends with a dragonfly named Flu and told her his sad story and his dream of seeing the lilac mists again. The dragonfly learned that the lilac mists could be found in the country of Happiness. The wanderer went there and, although he fell from a cliff along the way, Master Boos found him and told him who he was in the land of Happiness. Master Boos built a hut for him and took care of him until he recovered. When the Wanderer was able to walk again, “walking, he was searching, hoping to see his mists, the lilac mists,” until he learned that in the Land of Happiness the lilac mists come only once a year. At the end of the first tale, unfinished and retyped with many ellipses, the Wanderer becomes acquainted with a beautiful young woman named Lucy, and at last he manages to see the lilac mists. Other parts of the fairy tale remained unwritten. There was almost no social content in the fairy tales, and as a genre, they were more like fantasy. As such they are some of the earliest works of this genre in Russia.

 

04 (1977–1978), Img 12

 

09 (1977), Img 05

 

Later, Azazello endlessly rewrote his fairy tales, wrote new ones,[89] and developed fairy-tale motifs in his poetry. Azazello’s drawings could be considered illustrations of his fairy-tale imagination. The themes of a trip to a fairy-tale land, a cold winter, the expectation of spring in a cold land, and other romantic motifs are present in both his fairy-tale poetry and his drawings.

 

12 (1976–1977), Img 37

 

04 (1977–1978), Img 09

 

04 (1977–1978), Img 10

 

04 (1977–1978), Img 15

 

19b (1982), Img 7

 

Playful utopianism and popular utopian movements

As S. M. Loiter noted, however remote this comparison may seem, children’s games about going to a magical country (and, I would add, the playful utopias of the cultural underground) can be compared with the peasant social-utopia legends about “far-off countries” which ethnologist K. V. Chistov discovered and studied.[90] Yet another important parallel between the sentiments in the late-Soviet cultural underground and those found in the milieu of early modern religious communities is the widespread occurrence of practices of symbolic renunciation of citizenship (nationality).

Beginning in the eighteenth century, flight from the authorities and refusal to cooperate with them were fundamental forms of protest for those who, for one reason or another, did not acknowledge the state’s increasing power over them. These were, above all, were representatives of the schism and religious sectarianism. Religious anarchism was intrinsic to the radical priestless (bezpopovtsy) movements of Old Believers—the beguny (runaways) and stranniki (pilgrims), skrytniki (concealers), netovtsy (Savior’s Confession), neplatel’shchiki (non-payers), etc.—who thought state power was the power of the Antichrist and saw flight from it as the way to save their souls. From the eighteenth century to the early twentieth century, their symbolic renunciation of citizenship was expressed in flight (collective or individual) to remote regions in Russia/the Soviet Union and abroad, in refusing passports (and occasionally even their own personal and family names), and refusals to swear oaths (to the new sovereign or the army), pay taxes, participate in the census and military service, and register their marriages and the baptisms of their children as well as refusals of generally accepted social and political categories, submission to laws and the regime’s representatives, and even, in later periods, refusal to take part in elections. The refusers contrasted real citizenship to various kinds of “heavenly citizenships,” (in the Kingdom of Heaven, the New Jerusalem, etc.) or, in the secular version, citizenship in some real or imaginary “ideological fatherland.”[91]

Sectarian refusals had a religious-psychological foundation and did not have the character of a purposeful social movement. The most appropriate term for the goal of this kind of protest is the concept of escapism, “the desire of individuals, social, classes [soslovie] or other groups for isolation, to fanatically limit or completely sever contacts with people and communities belonging to broader collectivities (including the state) in order escape from their authority and influence.”[92] The result of consistently adhering to such an attitude could be self-isolation or “the flight of entire groups to neighboring countries,” in which case the fugitives hoped that they would find themselves in conditions which would provide “greater security and religious tolerance for them.”[93] Pro-emigration sentiments and practices were widespread in the Russian sectarian milieu.

At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, religious dissidents protesting the state’s interference became the first to assert their “zone of autonomy.” Researchers have looked at the religious bases of “anti-feudal” protest and the intensive symbolic creativity which accompanied such protest but for most cases in the traditional peasant environment this protest did not reach the level of independent political theories. Nonetheless, religious practices of flight and refusal to cooperate were the basis for the emergence of the pacifist movement in Russia.

John Yoder, the well-known Mennonite theologian and author of many works about Christian pacifism and Christian social ethics, developed a typology of religious pacifism in his book Nevertheless.[94] Like the pacifism of Soviet hippies, in most cases the pacifism of Russian sectarians falls into two types described by Yoder. Both types do not necessarily imply following the commandment “do not kill” or any kind of ethics of nonviolence; instead, the most important things are withdrawing from the world, being unwilling to take part in its affairs, and refusing to cooperate with the state.

He calls the first type the “pacifism of cultural isolation.” One sees this, for example, in several Mennonite communities.[95] According to Yoder, this type of pacifism is more typical of isolated social groups of this kind, whose representatives are so alienated from the larger society and so focused on their own culture that the values and problems of the former have no meaning for them. This society seems so alien to them that they don’t want to defend it from external enemies or fight for its freedom. The characteristic features of this type of pacifism are indifference to the fate of the world, the absence of messianic responsibility for it, and eagerness to extend their values to it.

The pacifism of “consistent nonconformism” is very close to the type discussed above. In the framework of the pacifism of “consistent nonconformism,” military service is seen (for example, among the Amish and the Hutterites) as the quintessential sin, outweighing all others.[96] Compulsory military service is considered an attack that “the world” (in the evangelical sense of the word) is making on their values and way of life. Withdrawal from the “world” makes it necessary to create a Christian cultural alternative to it. Therefore, adherents of this type of pacifism are very creative in terms of social and cultural work. Yoder also draws attention to the fact that consistent renunciation of the world gives rise to a covert form of dependence on it, the need to always be against it and to show one’s nonconformism at every opportunity.

The Russian Old Believer and sectarian traditions of passive protest attracted the attention of the Russian radical intelligentsia, which began to study them intently, for both scholarly and practical reasons. At the beginning of the twentieth century, methods of passive resistance were used more often by educated people; they became secularized and took on the contours of purposeful actions. The Tolstoyans paid special attention to similar practices. They supported popular protest against the state’s total assault on all spheres of life, supplementing it with the ideas of peace and nonviolence. Thus, during this period, a “religious freedom” (svobodno-religioznoe) (or “freedom-Christian,” svobodno-khristianskoe) movement emerged. Its main goals were to protect freedom of conscience and to assert the values of nonviolence in society. Tolstoyans built their movement on popular traditions of renunciation. It could be said that they were attempting to convert sectarians’ and peasants’ daily-life practices of passive resistance and noncooperation into a political technology, a conscious, purposeful social protest.

As was shown above, similar sentiments and practices were widespread in the late Soviet hippie milieu. In the 1970s and 1980s, individual representatives of “Soviet” hippies and other strands of the counterculture, other-thinkers, and dissidents also openly declared their non-citizenship in the USSR. Their protest was, in many respects, also anti-disciplinary in nature, including widespread refusals to serve in the military and cooperate with the state in other ways as well as anti-border and anti-classification sentiments and transborder and utopian identities, which were also enshrined symbolically—in clothing, hairstyles, slang, behavior, and artistic output. For the most part, hippies used the same forms of symbolic resistance as the common people and sectarians who practiced avoidance. Among these forms was also a distinctive set of practices signifying their renunciation of Soviet citizenship.

Like their predecessors at the beginning of the century, the radical pacificists of the 1970s and 1980s tried to organize a social movement based on these practices. This movement’s main goals were to generate societal affirmation of the values of nonviolence, to fight for freedom of conscience, and to assert—in public awareness and in the law—the “right to refuse” to serve in the military. And it began with a struggle for the body, for personal inviolability.

 

“Moe telo—moe delo”: The struggle of Soviet hippies for personal inviolability and bodily autonomy

There is a notable disciplining dimension of the domestic politics of contemporary states which appears regardless of the economic or ideological systems prevailing in them. It is the result of the state’s development as an autonomous entity with its own interests. The way to ensure these interests has been to create a “disciplinary society,” with its characteristic system of control over the behavior and thoughts of individuals, assisted by an entire network of institutions such as the police, prisons, and medical and pedagogical institutions. They accompany a person from birth across the entire lifespan; their purpose is to “normalize” behavior and thoughts and to adapt subjects’ bodies to be used to as advantageously as possible in the interests of the state (military service, tax collection, the establishment of political control).

To normalize and control, contemporary states “seek to monopolize … symbolic force … the power to name, to identify, to categorize … people in relation to gender, religion, property-ownership, ethnicity, literacy, criminality, or sanity. Censuses apportion people across these categories, and institutions—from schools to prisons—sort out individuals in relation to them.”[97] Under these circumstances, people who are not inscribed into the norm, into the categories imposed by the state—religious dissidents, the socially marginalized, and socially active people—are the first to come under suspicion. It is just such people who are the first to begin to resist controlling institutions and practices, to balk at the “abstract schema of a single standardized citizenship” imposed on them. In such conditions, their faith, their conscience, their subjectivity become a problem.

The very first stage of such a struggle is the “struggle for the body,” a fight for bodily and personal inviolability. This theme has come to the fore during various historical periods: at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth as well as in the late Soviet era, and it is relevant today. As political scientist Sergei Medvedev recently wrote in an article about the self-immolation of Nizhny Novgorod journalist Irina Slavina:

 

The battle for the body has been waged for a long time in Putin’s Russia, it is one of the main springboards for the authoritarian regime’s assault on the individual. From the cannibalistic “Dima Iakovlev Law” and homophobic norms about the prohibition of “homosexual propaganda” to an aggressive pronatalist policy (which for all intents and purposes is squeezing abortions out of the compulsory health insurance system) and the barbaric destruction of banned food—the state is systematically invading its citizens’ bedrooms, kitchens, and refrigerators, forcing them into “correct,” normative corporeality … Michel Foucault called this state activity “biopolitics”: the government sees the population as a biomass to be managed, applying medical and sanitary power technologies, with the bodies of citizens at its disposal.

 

He considers Slavina’s self-immolation “a terrible and symbolically irrefutable argument, a verdict on a closed, soulless and irresponsive system in which human beings are condemned to only the most extreme form of protest.”[98]

Medvedev argues that the body

 

becomes the last, “extreme,” instrument of human protest: when a person’s mouth is shut and the doors and windows are locked—inflicting injury on one’s person’s own body remains the only way to assert oneself and “break” the system if only psychologically and morally. Caged animals who mutilate themselves because of cramped quarters and a sense of hopelessness are well aware of this, as are prisoners in Soviet and Russian penal colonies, where corporeal protest is often the sole accessible form of refusal. Prisoners “dissect themselves” (cut their veins), chop off their fingers (a radical form of “noncompliance,” refusal to work), they sew their lips together, they nail themselves to the benches.[99]

 

Soviet hippies also began their movement as a protest against the state’s power to control their bodies, consider them state property, regulate their external appearance, subject them to regimentation, treat them like “cannon fodder,” and to use any kind of violence in the effort to make them “normal” and obedient.

On 14 May 1972, in a square in Kaunas, Romas Kalanta (1953–1972) set himself on fire as a protest against the Soviet Union’s occupation of Latvia. He died soon after in the hospital. His funeral led to youth riots during which many young people, including hippies, were detained and punished. Those hippies who thought of hippism as a social movement included this event in the history of hippism.[100]

Self-immolation is an extreme and rare form of protest. In the Soviet hippie milieu, symbolic protest (imitating suicide by cutting one’s veins) was more widespread, although there were more enough actual suicides in their milieu.[101] Azazello’s hands bore traces of cuts although he denied that he had ever seriously planned a voluntary exit from life.

A unique variant of the struggle for bodily autonomy is the notorious “free love” of hippies;[102] the same could be said about the relationship to the body as a source of pleasure—in Soviet culture such a relationship could be considered an episode from the history of the revolutionary struggle for the body in the late Soviet period.[103]

As was true of the pacifists of the first third of the twentieth century, the ego-documents of Soviet hippies and the plot lines of their memoirs were built around lists of disciplinary institutions and stories of encounters with them (parental power, kindergarten, school, the police, the army, the psychiatric hospital, etc.), and the attempts of these institutions to violate their personal integrity. The climax of a proper “hippish” autobiography is the refusal to cooperate with these institutions and the rebellion against them. Next in hippies’ self-descriptions comes searching for their niche, a refuge that protects them from the state’s assault, and finding it in the tusovka, in the circle of like-minded people, the hippie brotherhood, the commune, etc. Almost all these themes are present in Azazello’s notebooks and in interviews with him.

Without the “disciplinary” context of late Soviet life, Soviet hippies’ fixation on their hair might seem like a strange, childish caprice. Episodes involving the struggle for hair—and violent, forcible haircuts—are a widespread part of the hippie narrative. Azazello was not original in his rejection of institutions of disciplinary control and his fight for the right to look the way he himself wanted to. He described how he was forced to submit to a forced haircut three times. The first time this happened was when he went to a new school as a ninth-grade student: the school demanded that he cut his long hair and, since he had no intention of doing that, his mother and the hairdresser colluded and tricked him to make the haircut happen.[104] In protest, Azazello stopped going to school and began to lead the kind of life which led him to hippies.[105] A year and a half later, in May 1972, Richard Nixon, the president of the United States, visited the Soviet Union. For Nixon’s visit, Moscow was “cleansed” of marginalized elements, including hippies. During the “cleanup,” Azazello was taken to the police station and lost his hair: “Nixon came to Moscow and they ‘screwed’ me at the police station, and I saw some guys on Tverskaia, they still had their hair. They were a year older than me. And they let them go—because they were older. And I was sixteen, a kid … I cried. They cut my hair and I cried.”[106] The third time he lost his long hair was when he was arrested for using drugs. (“And you do know what my hair was like when they took me to jail? It was below my waist! Can you imagine? This was such a tragedy for me! Well, I got out and I haven’t cut my hair since then.”)[107]

Rumor has it that one of Soviet hippies’ rare public actions—the August 1971 demonstration in Grodno—was a response to the beatings and forcible haircuts endured by hippies from the Baltic republics who were visiting Grodno. During the action around one hundred (a number that was probably quite exaggerated) young people carrying signs saying, “Hands off long hair,” “Stop the terror,” “Freedom for rock-n-roll,” and “All you need is love” marched from the corner of Socialist and Marx Streets to Soviet Square. The column was quite picturesque: “[K]ids with long hair, dressed in bell-bottom trousers and elephant-bell jeans, flowered shirts, some with an earring in one ear, a hippie who was carrying a Spanish fighting cock on a chain was at the head of the column. Along the way to the square, the participants were detained, put in buses, taken out of town and release, ‘people who looked especially defiant were dragged to the Textile Workers’ Palace of Culture, which was right on the square—their hair was cut off, their jeans were ripped apart [and] their belts were pulled off." The demonstrators were not prosecuted but some of them were prevented from continuing their education or lost their jobs.[108]

In the Soviet cultural underground, the ways to maintain bodily autonomy were primarily symbolic. These could take the form of creating their own, non-Soviet clothing, refusing to study or develop a career, and the occasional overarching “refusal to work”[109] for the benefit of the USSR.

Azazello attributed the beginning of his hippism to the fact that Ofeliia taught him how to sew clothing (“[W]ell, I think, hippies began with samostrok [homemade clothes]—when they themselves began to sew. At that point you didn’t depend on … expensive, jeans”).[110] This statement is not an exaggeration—the topic of making your own clothes, in your own, non-Soviet style, was important for hippies. Perceiving “sovok” as “metaphysical ugliness but not just a separate political system,”[111] they did not accept Soviet clothes, attempting instead to wear imported or homemade garments—samostrok. Many of them, not just young women, knew how to sew and embroider and do needlework in general. A visitor to the September 1975 exhibition of unofficial art held at the House of Culture at the VDNKh, in which the Hair group took part, wrote with admiration: “The hippies were feeling fine … they were lying on the lawn, under a tree, they spread out their purses and their silk thread on the grass, they are embroidering (reader, these are boys!).”[112]

Samostrok was initially intended to be worn by the maker and his or her friends but in the mid-1970s, for especially talented fashion designers, producing it had already become a way to become self-sufficient. In the 1980s, the sale of hippie paraphernalia, “fenechki” (friendship bracelets) and other things—“bracelets made from beads and leather, medallions, small purses”[113]—was widespread. Tsarevna Liagushka, Ofeliia, Dzen Baptist (Vladimir Teplyshev),[114] Elena Toropova, Aleksandr Dormidontov (Sass’), Ural Khaziev (Dzhimi), Larisa Chukaeva, and Sveta Iurlova (Konfeta) were well-known, in fact one could even call them legendary, artist-fashion designers in the hippie milieu.

Consistently withdrawing from society implied choosing not to develop a career. Among the members of the Soviet cultural underground, we find artist’s models, boiler stokers and boiler mechanics, porters and janitors, watchmen, cleaning women and garbagemen, elevator attendants and concierges, hospital orderlies, black marketeers, secondhand-book sellers, yoga teachers, nannies and kindergarten teachers, seasonal and sometimes even factory workers, waiters, unofficial artists, and fashion designers. Cutting their ties with society and preoccupied with ethical and aesthetic issues, they felt that the types of work typically done by members of the Soviet intelligentsia (i.e., educated people) were unacceptable for them and they sought the kinds of social niches which would allow them to preserve their personal autonomy while avoiding cooperation with the authorities. In the work ethics of the Soviet cultural underground, and Soviet hippies in particular, we can uncover traces of both popular and peasant practices of passive protest (running away from the state, self-sufficiency, sabotage, petty fraud, theft, and the like) and intelligentsia practices of “outsidedness” (vnenakhodimost’),[115] whose purpose was to have minimal contact with the regime in order to have as much free time as possible for unfettered creative self-realization.

The themes of working and slacking are present in virtually every memoir about the period from the 1960s through the 1980s. Analysis of these memoirs, however, makes it possible to argue that the motives here are more complicated than simple laziness: the reluctance to work is instead the result of a consciously chosen social outsiderism, the desire to “keep a low profile” in the social sense and thus to “escape from no end of humiliating social obligations.”[116]

Azazello didn’t like and, on principle, didn’t want to work. He finished eighth grade and began ninth grade, but he connected with hippies, dropped out of school, and never got the education that would enable him to take up a profession. Although he did try to learn the occupations typical of “internal emigrants” (being a carpenter, a porter, an artist’s model), he didn’t stay in one place for long. Work weighed heavily on him and at the first possibility he quit working altogether: after his mother died and he came out of the psychiatric hospital, he rented an apartment, lived with friends, was in dire straits, and finally, in 2002, received a disability pension. It was a very small pension, but poverty was not a problem, it was part of the ideology of the movement he belonged to: for hippies the “cult of poverty” and the corresponding minimization of consumption were typical ways for them to withdraw from the social control exerted by one’s family of origin and society as a whole.

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, a similar set of attitudes among the Russian intelligentsia gave rise to the Russian communitarian movement, whose participants abandoned their urban professions and founded “intelligentsia” agricultural communities to live by physical labor as peasants did. The countercultural radicalism of the hippies’ movement resembles this earlier movement and communes, including agricultural ones, were an important topic for the American and European hippie movements. This way of life was associated with freedom and was aligned perfectly with the ethics of autonomy and asceticism.[117]

However, this cannot be said of Soviet hippies, who often discussed organizing communes but never seriously attempted to carry out these projects.[118] A few attempts in the late 1960s and early 1970s to find a secluded place for “communes” (which were intended to further the long-term goal of changing society) ended unsuccessfully because of the vigilance of the law enforcement apparatus. The idea of hiding from the state and creating an autonomous commune or settlement in a far-off place came up periodically in the community and it was discussed,[119] but in the history of the movement only two attempts to create a commune are known: one commune-hostel (the Yellow Submarine Commune),[120] was realized although it was short-lived, and another one (Iura Solntse’s project of an agricultural commune in the Crimea in the late 1960s, about which there is no reliable information)[121] was foiled in its very earliest days. Unable to realize their communitarian aspirations for “police” reasons, Soviet hippies did not call attempts at communal living, communal property, or collective physical labor “communes.” Instead, they reserved that term for long periods of living together in “flats” (flety), at dachas, and at summer tent camps like the one at Gauja in Latvia and the “commune” at Mirobuditsa (Valdai), etc.

Hippies’ most important anti-disciplinary theme was protesting against police violence and arbitrariness. Entries in the “Slovar’ sistemnogo slenga” (Dictionary of sistema slang) point to the increased significance of this topic:

 

VINTIT’—to take [someone] to the police, with reference to the sistema—for a reason or for no reason.

KSIVA—a passport. CHISTAIA KSIVA [CLEAN PASSPORT]—a passport in which everything is in order in terms of the law—residence permits [propuski] etc.

KSIVNIK—a special small purse worn on the chest, sewn to be about the size of a passport.

OBEZ’IANNIK [the slammer]—the place where detainees are held at the police station [before being charged].

MENTURA—a police precinct.

SHUKHER (addition) [danger]—when someone shouts “Shukher!” it’s a warning of imminent danger.

STOIAT’ NA SHUKHERE [to be on the lookout]—to find out if danger is imminent while your friends are doing something not permitted from the viewpoint of the police and society. To be a lookout is a responsible and honorable thing to do![122]

 

As Aleksandr Ivanov puts it in his memoir, “[W]hile the army is a relatively far-off, potential nuisance for a ‘system’ person, the relationship with the police is a throbbing nerve that runs through every aspect of daily life. Here I think it’s necessary to point out that in all our travels around the USSR we were subjected to constant inspections and detention by the police. Why? Most often for no apparent reason…. At that time the regime (and the cops were its representatives) simply saw us and our appearance unequivocally as a protest. A protest, above all, against the way of living and thinking which the regime of communist bureaucrats defined for everyone born in sovok [the Soviet Union].”[123] “We spent half our lives in an ambush, sitting around waiting to be shot in the back of the head,” Azazello wrote. “That’s what I like best, in fact, during Soviet times life was spending half your life in an ambush waiting for to be shot in the back of the head.”[124] He returned to this topic repeatedly in his interviews, talking about being detained by the police, being beaten by them, and clashes with Komsomol patrols.

For hippies, an additional extremely important topic associated with bodily autonomy is the psychiatric hospital. This was such a painful experience that few want to remember it. The first time Azazello found himself in the psikhushka (the P. B. Gannushkin Psychiatric Hospital) was in 1974–1975, when he had to “slip away” (otkosit’) from the army and then, in 1981, he was in asylum at the same time as Ofeliia. In 1986, he was put in Psychiatric Hospital No. 5 for three years, where there was a special penal unit for compulsory treatment. Azazello’s notebooks from 1986–1988 are a record of daily life, events, and experiences of the period when he was in the psikhushka: stories about isolation, pain, humiliation, and alienation from his own body (“these eternal four walls, a host of idiots around [me]”).[125] He also touched on these subjects in his interviews.

Affirmation of the human right to freely dispose of one’s body is the main topic of Azazello’s friend Iura Diversant’s “declaration” (Azazello characterized the topic of this document as the “right to death,” the “right to drugs,” and he said, “the right to death, think about it, this is the same thing as the Right to life.”)[126] The “declaration” presumably dates from 1972, but, like many of Iura’s texts, it could have been rewritten and edited over many consecutive years. Iura wrote: “In conjunction with the fact that not only are independent mentalities, nonconformism, and free activity in whatever form persecuted by every possible means but alongside this, there is a widespread practice of retaliating almost physically against people who, because of their inborn or acquired qualities, are incapable of making either the physical or the mental changes in the direction dictated by the regime, and these people are hippies. We express our protest.” He continues:

 

Everyone wants something: communists want peace. Imperialists want war. Everyone cares about the fate of humanity. And all we need is Freedom.

We want to keep ourselves the way we are.

We demand for everyone without exception, for everyone who resists, or expresses their protest in any way—ABSOLUTE FREEDOM…

In all cases of incidents with the current regime we want everyone who only admits to belonging to the “hippie Sistema,” to be handed over immediately to their close friends and like-minded people. No changes of any kind in the appearance of those detained are admissible, for example: a haircut, change of clothes etc. Otherwise we will be forced to resort to the last means of our own defense—suicide…

We are willing to exist under these conditions, but in addition to the above each of us has the absolute right and every reason to dispose freely of both their soul and their body.[127]

 

Echoes of the existence of this “declaration” can be found in Rovner’s novel: “The hostage was considered a theorist, they attributed the text to him: ‘You have taken everything away from us—in schools you fucked up our brains, in the madhouses you stuck a knife in our memory. But we still have our life and the right to choose our own way of execution. We are the masters of our own blood, and we can do what we want with it—poison it with drugs or pour it out on the palisades.’”[128]

Azazello recalled that in 1975 Diversant gave him this document or another, similar one. He hid it in his old leather coat from the 1940s, which his uncle used to wear, he was detained by the police and sent to the anti-delinquency unit, and only by a miracle did they fail to find the document.

In this sense, the bodies of hippies were the most appropriate material for making a peace sign: we know of two similar photographs, one taken in 1977 at the hippie camp at Solnechnoe, on the banks of the Gulf of Finland,[129] and the other the 1980 Lviv peace sign.

 

From a tusovka to a movement and back

A very similar worldview—rejection of the world, the values and habits prevailing in society—led to the formation of a peace movement in Russia twice during the twentieth century, at its beginning and again at its end. This movement was represented in the first third of the twentieth century by the Tolstoyans and the sectarians who supported them and at the end of the twentieth century by the independent grass-roots peace and pacifist movement.

The Tolstoyan-sectarian pacifist movement of the first third of the twentieth century was violently cut off in the 1930s. Its rebirth began in the 1970s and its initial stimulus was likewise the anti-disciplining protest of marginalized people, this time, Soviet socio-cultural outsiders; independent of the state’s ideological rhetoric, its disciplining militarized existence remained the same. These late-twentieth-century outsiders were people who had fallen out (leaving voluntarily or pushed out by circumstances) of Soviet reality (refusenik scientists, hippies, including hippie junkies, unofficial artists and other representative of the cultural underground, disabled people, religious dissidents, adherents of the New Age movement). In the late Soviet period, the independent peace movement followed the same developmental trajectory as the pacifist movement of the early twentieth century. In both cases, symbolic practices of renunciation of citizenship grew into conscious and open protest against institutionalized state violence, a struggle for freedom of conscience, and nonviolence as the main value of living together in the community of human beings, broadly understood.

A grass roots, independent alternative to the official peace movement emerged in Eastern Europe in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It focused on defending international peace and promoting the values of nonviolence in society. Under this rubric, this movement saw peace as inextricably linked with human rights.[130] In the USSR, this movement was represented by two antimilitarist groups, the Group for Establishing Trust between the USSR and the USA (the Trust Group, 1982–1989) and Free Initiative (1982 until the early 1990s).

The Trust Group was founded by a whole group of unusual people, one of whom was a representative of the Soviet hippie community, the underground artist Sergei Batovrin. Free Initiative was Iura Diversant’s project. Both these men were well acquainted with Azazello. His notebooks contain only two notes mentioning Batovrin as well as some symbolic references to the antinuclear and antimilitaristic agenda, nonetheless, in his interview he confirmed that Rein (Aerosfinks Terrein or Rein, Batovrin’s hippie name) was a close acquaintance. Diversant was even closer to Azazello: there are notes about Iura, drawings, poems, and photographs of him in Azazello’s archive and in interviews, he repeatedly talked about Diversant’s leaflets and actions. He knew quite a lot about all of this, and he helped to distribute his texts.[131]

 

21 (1982–1983, 1985), Img 076

 

In the mid-1970s, Diversant and Troianskii were already dreaming of creating a genuine social movement based in the hippie community. Il’ia Kestner described how Diversant and his closest friends were preoccupied with an idea-driven search: they were looking for information about the history of the narodnik movement and anarchism in Russia, the White movement, Western hippies, and the New Left. Their search also led them to Christian circles and seminars. Iura spoke about this period in a 1988 interview with Ekspress-khronika: “At that time our ideals were not being realized at all in real life and we wanted to do something good and useful for people.”[132]

At around the same time, Sergei Batovrin was thinking about transforming Soviet hippies’ spontaneous, unformed, passive protest into a social movement. As he himself writes, “[B]ack in 1976, looking with regret at the decline of morals in the new generation of the ‘Sistema,’ Diver[sant] and I spent a long time discussing plans for bringing Soviet hippies back to their own circles and turning them into an antimilitaristic movement. From 1976 to 1981 the expression of the pacifist perspective colored all my exhibits and various humanitarian endeavors.”[133]

These groups differed in their social make-up: the Trust Group’s membership initially came mostly from the intelligentsia, and representatives of the counterculture only began to become a noticeable component from 1984 while at that time the only members of Free Initiative were hippies. According to some reports, Batovrin invited hippies to join the Trust Group, but they didn’t want to compromise their way of life.[134]

 

21 (1982–1983), Img 003

 

The two groups’ agendas and types of activity were very different. The Trust Group’s program included a crusade to make Soviet society more open, the development of “people’s diplomacy” (that is, grassroots contacts between ordinary people, social organizations, and academic collectives), advocacy for giving society control over domestic policy, and struggles against the image of the “enemy” and the militarization of consciousness and the economy. The group composed and distributed appeals to the governments of the USSR and the USA and the global community, tried to organize antiwar exhibitions and street actions, and regularly held scholarly seminars. They established ties with foreign peace activists and pacifists whose representatives visited the USSR, participated in the group’s seminars, and organized actions in defense of persecuted members of the Group. From 1985, the group became more radical and supplemented its antimilitarism with pacifist ideas. They protested the Afghan war, demonstrated in defense of conscientious objectors and for the development of an alternative to military service, campaigned to protect the environment, proposed a conversion program, criticized the Soviet atomic weapons program, etc.

From the very beginning, Free Initiative’s agenda included protesting against the war in Afghanistan.[135] In the 1980s and the early 1990s, its activity consisted of distributing pacifist leaflets and organizing “pacifist” meetings of hippies at Tsaritsyno to mark 1 June, the Day of the Defense of Children. Diversant’s group also helped to organize the December “antiwar” meeting in memory of John Lennon at the observation platform in the Lenin Hills. In 1983, the meeting at Tsaritsyno ended when the police broke it up and people were detained. Afterwards, leaflets calling for abolition of the death penalty and, according to unconfirmed reports, ending the war in Afghanistan were found in the park.[136] After these events, Diversant was accused of the possession of narcotics without intent to sell and forcibly hospitalized at a special kind of psychiatric hospital, the Sychevko Psychiatric Hospital in Smolensk oblast’. In 1985, the same thing happened to Troianskii, who ended up in a psikhuska on the same charge.[137]

It cannot be said that the idea of creating a social movement based on pacifist values found broad support in counterculture circles. Batovrin was forced to leave the Soviet Union in May 1983, but in late 1983, another hippie, Sasha Rubchenko (Rulevoi, 1960–2018), joined the group as did Viktor Smirnov (Fulia, Vanderful, 1950–), who was also close to hippies. In 1984, Larisa Chukaeva, Natasha Akulenok, and Ol’ga Kabanova entered the group. In public space, the Sistema persistently asserted itself for a year before perestroika, as if anticipating its beginning. During that time, “ideological” hippie-pacifists, hippie-artists, and “informals” ramped up the creation and distribution of samizdat, fought to conquer urban space (the Arbat in particular) to hold unsanctioned exhibitions and concerts and just to hang out.[138] They appear more frequently in the mass media, contributed to the new political press, attended the Trust Group’s seminars, and joined its actions. In the autumn of 1987, hippie Alik Olisevich (1958–) founded the Lvov Trust Group. The environment for creating a movement was significantly broader than the number of its conscious and active supporters. Nevertheless, at critical moments in the relationship between society and the state, there were people in this environment who were ready to declare their values in public space and defend them.

Azazello wasn’t involved in these events: he spent the beginning of perestroika in a psychiatric hospital. Nonetheless, it is possible to conclude that the sentiments of people like Azazello were rich soil for forming pacifist movements. Azazello was always somewhere near the leaders of pacifist groups; he sympathized with their views, shared most of the “ideological” hippies’ values, was interested in the things they were doing, and occasionally helped them in quite unsafe ventures but he didn’t want to join any of these initiatives himself.

At the beginning of the 1990s, several “sistema” people entered the Transnational Radical Party (TRP), undoubtedly attracted by the anti-prohibitionism in the party’s program.[139] Azazello was interested in the TRP for the same reason and occasionally read its periodicals but overall, his attitude to it was ironic: he noticed that although this party was Italian in origin, somehow, most of its members were citizens of the Soviet Union. Having become acquainted with him by chance on the subway, peace movement activist Annemie Ummels found him to be a knowledgeable and interesting conversation partner in discussions about the problems of the peace movement.[140] However, in general, the movement that emerged in the 1980s, which focused on promoting the values of nonviolence in society, faded away in the first half of the 1990s: at protests against the Chechen wars, the voice of late-Soviet pacifists who had come out of the countercultural milieu were not in evidence.

Azazello’s notebooks from the 1990s are a record of daily life which have no references to a fairy-tale reality, and they have almost no drawings and poetry: “You can’t get enough strength, when you realize that revolutions end in old age.”[141] Azazello had a kindly but ironic attitude toward my scholarly interest in and research on pacifism. Our last meeting took place at a café near the Mendeleevskaia metro station on 25 July 2016. Thin, sick, stoned, when we said goodbye, he stood up and, swaying and laughing softly, told me, “Ir … well, look at me … what else could I be? Just a pacifist…” A month later he died.

 

P.S.

“We renounce violence and intolerance” … And you, are you the author? Just you? No one else?

You know, I never liked gangbanging (laughs), seriously! … Yes, even if I’m the first, I don’t care, I’m not going! This isn’t pacifism. It’s squeamishness. So, can you explain pacifism as squeamishness toward violence?

Yes, you can…

Will you put that in somewhere?