Russian Active Measures. Группа авторов
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of this hippie organization by KGB undercover officers, managed to prevent these activities.
The ideological justification for KGB covert operations against the youth culture were the hippies’ alleged connections to fascism and neo-fascism portrayed as an intrinsic feature that underpinned the Prague Spring. In the KGB analysis, the hippies were active collaborators of pro-fascist elements in Czechoslovakia who allegedly inspired the 1968 Prague Spring. Similar claims related to socialist Hungary, where hippie groups were arrested for allegedly collecting intelligence for one of the Western diversion spy centers. In 1971, the KGB exploited the same ideological arguments when analyzing the activities of Ukraine’s hippies who allegedly spread fascist ideas. The declarations made by Oleksandr Balykin, a student at the Mykolaiv Ship-Building Institute, about the similarities between the modern youth’s worldview and Hitler’s ideas discarding conscience, shame, and morality, served as supporting evidence for the KGB. Its analysis also included a Ukrainian hippie group from Lviv as an example of this connection, highlighting their “black ties,” crosses, and swastikas that the hippies displayed on numerous occasions publicly.50 The alleged links between the hippie and fascist ideologies gave the KGB carte blanche to act aggressively and curtail the political activism of youth in Soviet Ukraine.
Clearly, the Czech youth political activities in 1968 forced the KGB to think about the Ukrainian hippies’ political activism in similar terms. The commercialization of Soviet youth culture and disco music that became extremely popular among Soviet youth seemed innocent in comparison with political statements made by the hippies and their attempts to organize. The KGB arrested hundreds of Ukrainian imitators of American hippies and expelled them from universities and the Komsomol all over Ukraine. Ukrainian punks who were similarly portrayed as neo-Nazi presented the same threat to the Soviet system, the Soviet Ukrainian culture, and the Soviet identity of Komsomol members.
The KGB Anti-Fascist Campaign
The KGB documented two massive organized youth movements in Soviet Ukraine after Stalin, which challenged the very existence of the Komsomol, an official Soviet youth organization, and offered the venues for anti-Soviet activities in which thousands of Komsomol members participated in the 1960s–1980s. The hippie movement emerged first, followed by the punk “imitation” movement. At the beginning, the members of both movements had some cultural fixation with Western cultural products, mainly rock music and films, but by the 1980s their cultural practices evolved embracing neo-Nazi ideas, processes that were documented by the KGB. These practices became more prominent, and even radical, especially among Soviet imitators of Western punks.51 Moreover, in contrast to the Ukrainian followers of hippies who were older and more college educated, adopting American cultural practices of pacifism and non-violence, the Ukrainian punks were much younger, with only high school education, and they adopted more radical, violent, and sometimes explicitly neo-fascist models informed by the neo-fascist movements that emerged in Italy, Germany, and Britain after 1945.
In the fall of 1982, in their letters to Ukraine’s communist leaders, KGB officers persisted in their claims that Soviet Ukrainian youth exhibited clear affinity with neo-Nazi and fascist ideas. The KGB discovered numerous pictures of fascist swastika on sidewalks and the walls of public buildings and telephone booths in many Ukraine cities, including the city of Chernivtsi. In September 1982, the KGB established the identity of at least five former students of the local technical schools (all of them were between 17 and 19 years of age) who were engaged in those “neo-fascist” activities. The report stated that they all listened to American “beat-music worshipping American pop-idols,” which profoundly shaped their worldviews.52
In addition, the KGB report stressed that the Italian film San Babila—8 PM (in Italian: San Babila ore 20: un delitto inutile), a “film about the outrages of fascist youth [in Italy] [beschinstvakh fashistvuiushchei molodiozhi],” contributed to those young people’s interest in fascist ideology, symbols, and paraphernalia.53 This film was directed by Carlo Lizzani in 1976, and was included in the program of the Tenth Moscow International Film Festival in 1977. The idea of the film was inspired by violent events that took place at the Piazza San Babila in Milan in 1975. Groups of neo-fascists and anarchist communists became the protagonists for this film. Four Milanese boys were part of a neo-fascist group that subscribed to Benito Mussolini’s ideas of a new order, based on “squadrism.”54 The boys were fighting against the youth groups of communists and anarchists and frequently collided during the protests with violent outcomes. As the film portrays, one day the leader of the neo-fascist group asked Franco, the most insecure boy of the brigade, to perform a violent and demonstrative act against a randomly chosen communist boy, in order to redeem his “honor.” So one night at the Piazza San Babila, the boys met a couple of lovers, dressed in red (they were believed to be communists). The group’s state of madness drove the boys to chase the lovers and stab them. Franco was shocked and ran away from home, denouncing the assault to the police.
The KGB officer realized that the young Ukrainian imitators of Italian neo-fascism were especially influenced by the images of fashionable outfits and behavioral patterns of the young neo-fascist heroes from this Italian film.55 At home the young men listened to forbidden rock music broadcast by foreign radio stations, organized their meetings at a Chernivtsi downtown café, and publicly denounced the Soviet system and politics.56 Two of them, the leaders of that group, openly discussed the potential replacement of the Soviet political system that, in their view, was absolutely necessary, and a transfer of political power to a “military regime” that would manage the state through the fascist methods of political governing. The police discovered that these individuals displayed large images of a swastika in public. They were also suspected of another transgression: on 10 May 1981 someone burned the Soviet state banner, hanging on the façade of a public building in downtown Chernivtsi.57
Moreover, these individuals argued that the Soviet political system must be replaced by the strong authoritarian power of the fascist state because the Soviet state was nothing less than a “mafia state” and the rule of the Soviet Communist Party was a “mafia rule.” The police also learned that these references were widespread, and young neo-fascists embraced this terminology in all major Ukrainian cities. The depositions of those who were arrested were consistent, emphasizing the significant influence of the Italian film on them.58
The KGB Campaign against the Punks
In Soviet Ukraine, the KGB campaign against young neo-fascists converged with the old ideological campaign against the corrupt influences of Western popular music. This campaign was conceived in the 1960s as a struggle against the “beat music” of the Beatles and Rolling Stones and their hippie imitators, being reconceptualised as a campaign against “fascist punks” and reaching its peak in 1980–1981. To some extent, this campaign was a reaction to information published in Soviet central periodicals, where British punks were presented as neo-fascists and “skinheads.” In this light, the connection between Western music, the punk movement, and fascist symbols established by the KGB became more transparent. They all were to be prohibited from mass consumption in the Soviet Union.
According to Soviet music critics, the description of punks as fascists offered in Soviet periodicals confused and disoriented thousands of communist ideologists in provincial cities of Soviet Ukraine:
The only thing anyone knew about punks was that they were “fascists” because that’s how our British-based correspondents had described them for us. Several angry feature articles