Russian Active Measures. Группа авторов
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the hippies systematically listened to.39 The major KGB concern was to prevent the hippies from organizing and establishing an intercity communication network. There was information about such attempts when in 1969 the representatives of various hippie groups in Kyiv, Odesa, Kharkiv, and Voroshylovhrad tried to organize the first republican, and then all-Union, congresses that would help unite all hippies in one centralized organization. The objective of this organization would be sharing literature and art to popularize the ideas and the philosophy of hippies. The KGB operatives infiltrated the most active groups, undermining their efforts from inside.40
As a result of these “prophylactic measures” against hippies in 1970, KGB officers were able to offer their bosses a general picture of hippie groups and their origin. Twenty members of two hippie groups in Kharkiv served as the model for their investigations. The KGB learned that their initial impulse for gathering together came from their passion for western (rock) music. In 1968, two students, A. Soloviev and A. Makarenko, and one dropout, Yu. Shatunovskii, from the Kharkiv State University, created an “amateur club of fans” of rock music that in 1968 and 1969 organized numerous so-called “psycho-concerts” in their private apartments and in the basements and stairways of public places. According to KGB reports, the ideologically dangerous events included music by foreign music stars, including “songs of obscene content, questionable in a political and artistic sense.” The KGB emphasized that these individuals planned to unite up to 2000 people, and they even wrote a program that stipulated the rights and duties of its members. The conspiratorial club “Society of Fighters for the Flaming Heart of Danko” (Klub bortsov plamennykh serdets Danko) was named after Danko, a character from Maxim Gorky’s Old Izergil, who sacrificed himself, saving his people with his flaming heart. The club members adopted a song performed by the the British rock band “The Animals” as its anthem.41
In October of 1969, Makarenko and Shatunovskii made an attempt to organize a demonstration of their followers at the Dzerzhynskyi Square in downtown Kharkiv. They planned to publicly demand the official recognition of their hippie organization by local authorities. The KGB conducted a special operation to curtail these activities, arresting ten Kharkiv hippie activists. Similarly, in April of 1970 in Voroshylovhrad, nine participants of a local hippie group were arrested for using drugs in public. The same month, the KGB reported that a hippie group from Zaporizhzhia organized a march in the city, attempting to popularize their ideas. Also Lviv had their own share of hippies: in December of 1970, 22 local hippies composed a statute (ustav) of the hippie club, planning a similar action. In April of 1971, 30 hippies from Ivano-Frankivsk organized a rock concert at the city’s central square. The evening of 18 June 1971 in Chernivtsi became memorable for the arrest of 17 hippies by KGB operatives. To celebrate Paul McCartney’s birthday, the hippies had marched in the streets, carrying hand-made banners with his portrait, completely paralyzing Chernivtsi’s downtown. Numerous arrests by the KGB eventually ceased these public actions, but not the movement itself.42 It kept growing, especially in the capital city of Kyiv.
By late 1969, the KGB discovered more than 170 hippies in Kyiv and uncovered their “president.” S. Baiev, a dropout from the Kyiv Pedagogical Institute, tried to unite and consolidate the movement in Kyiv. Baiev’s behavior was rather provocative. He maintained contacts with foreign tourists and journalists, especially with Americans, and publicly criticized the Soviet system. He and his followers condemned the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet troops, expressing their desire to escape abroad.43 Despite KGB active and prophylactic measures (arrests, expulsions from the Komsomol and colleges, interrogations of the participants and their parents), the hippie groups in Kyiv survived. In 1974, another hippie leader and a student of the Department of Biology at the Kyiv State University, Oleh Pokalchuk, reenergized the movement, accentuating the religious (spiritual) dimension in the life of Ukrainian hippies. Pokalchuk conceptualized a “Buddhist commune” as a new hippie model for his followers. During 1974–1975, the KGB documented active interactions of Ukrainian hippies with Orthodox Christian and Baptist communities, and the growing Krishnaite movement in Soviet Ukraine. These links helped them eventually connect with their foreign co-religionists.44
On 11 October 1979, in his official report to Volodymyr Shcherbytskyi, Vitalii Fedorchuk, head of the Ukrainian KGB, acknowledged the KGB failure to stop the “hippisty” movement in Ukraine. According to his statistics, the KGB recorded 80 criminal cases launched against those “who imitated Western hippies” in various regions of Ukraine: Lviv 48, Donetsk 6, Crimea 5, Poltava 5, Zaporizhzhia 5, Dnipropetrovsk 4, Kyiv 2, Kherson 2, Ternopil 2, Chernihiv 1. Among them, 65 people were between 16 and 25 years of age, and 15 people between 26 and 30 years of age; 64 were males, and 16 were females.45 Thirteen of them had been “targets of active KGB measures;” 10 were “involved in ideologically harmful actions;” 3 were indicted for criminal offences; 8 were arrested for manufacturing and selling drugs; 27 were arrested for using drugs; 15 were receiving medical treatment in mental institutions; 10 were “arrested for avoiding military service; and approximately 50% of all Ukrainian hippies did not study or work.”46 As late as April 1987, the KGB still confirmed the existence of the “hippies-pacifists” in Ukraine who called themselves “Sistema.” Overall, there were 60 hippies in the republic (mainly in Dnipropetrovsk, Lviv, Odesa, and Simferopol), and 30 in Kyiv.47
KGB reports offered the Ukrainian communist leadership a relatively thorough sociological analysis of the hippie movement and KGB active measures that were employed from 1969 to 1987 to curtail the movement in Ukraine. Based on interviews with former hippies, one such report stated:
On the one hand, there are young people, who (due to their young age) aspire to something unusual and romantic, reading a certain type of literature […] and are keen on their crazy ideas and colorful clothes […] (which allow them to stand out among their peers). On the other hand, there is another group of young people who understand very well the incompatibility of the hippies’ ideas with the Soviet system, nevertheless, joining the movement consciously. [These] people […] make money using this movement, i.e., selling clothes (“fartsuiut barakhlom”), drugs, and other things […] [they] criticize (“khaiut”) all Soviet things, calling them “sovdela” (Soviet stuff) […] [and] want to escape to the West, inciting others to do the same. […] many of them maintain connections with people living abroad, write and send letters abroad; they have relatives or friends there, or routinely establish contacts with foreigners visiting the city […] In their milieu, they propagandize “free love,” freedom of behavior and actions, parasitism and reluctance to obey (Soviet) laws and moral norms, calling this coercion […] They insist that “we have no democracy if we have only one ruling political party,” and that people should enjoy their lives instead of wasting it for the state …48
For the KGB, the major threat of the hippie movement seemed to be the politicization of Soviet youth and the emergence of political practices among them. The KGB identified this as the “institutionalization” of Soviet hippies, which was ultimately a dangerous alternative to Soviet youth institutions such as the Komsomol. KGB operatives feared the spread of this movement: the tentacles of the underground hippie clubs reached all major industrial cities. For instance, in February 1971 in Kirovohrad, local hippies organized the anti-Komsomol “Union of Free Youth” that included 20 members. They planned to organize a mass demonstration of the “free youth” of Kirovohrad, designed to mobilize young people for a collective fight for “freedom of speech, free love, and freedom of demonstrations.”49