AHC: Soviet "Hippie Movement"

Your challenge is to create a Soviet version of the counter-culture movement or some sort of an alternative counterculture group. What would their values be and how would the Soviet state respond
 
Probably based on a free economy, self-reliance, free expression and sexual freedom, albeit toned down from America's hippie movement. The Soviet government would undoubtedly throw them in gulags or execute them, and this could either be a blip on the radar or a huge problem for the Soviets.
 
I'm guessing they'd try to frame their movement within the Marxist/Soviet tradition itself? Sort of the way that some American hippies might have claimed descent from Thoreau or Walt Whitman(or, more controversially, Abbie Hoffman pointing to courtroom portraits of the Founding Fathers and telling Judge Hoffman "Those are the real revolutionaries!!"). The relative liberalism of Trotskyism might seem like a viable source, but that would likely have been suppressed by the authorities, even post-Stalin.
 
I think the sort of liberalization you see in the Prague Spring could have evolved into a political movement that opened up the ability for people to freely express themselves and demand more personal freedoms. I doubt all the Warsaw Pact countries would be onboard with a free economy, but I bet you can get some restrictions lifted and a lot of personal freedom to be accepted.

It'd be interesting to see what happens with a Warsaw Pact like this. I don't think it'd collapse (it took a perfect storm of problems and a failed counter-coup for the USSR to fall), in fact I think it'd probably end up surviving to the modern day and beyond after that.
 
or maybe section them under the Soviet equivalent of the mental health act

That too. You can bet the Soviet leadership won't stand for it. Their problem is if it catches on and people become sympathetic to the hippies. Others may start living the same way, undermining the Soviet goal and weakening the government. If they spread themselves too thin stamping out hippies, collapse will happen sooner rather than later.
 
There was a hippie movement in the Soviet Union. The problem was, it was underground. Beatles records were smuggled in to the USSR from abroad by diplomats and people with traveling privileges, copied on to disposed X-Ray images, and traded in rain coats on the street in secret. Teenagers with long hair were pulled in off the street and forcibly given haircuts. Teenagers would steal propaganda speakers off the street and use them to build electric guitars and amplifiers. The issue was, the old men leading the USSR saw the music of the west as Capitalist subversion and propaganda as much as crazed conservatives in the west thought it was a Communist influence in return. Only they lead the country.

The matter at hand is that the attempt to stop it did not succeed, and lead to a generation in the Soviet Union totally in love with the Beatles and other western music. The ironic thing is that the leadership eventually gave up, and by the 1970s you were seeing the stuff the west had seen in the 1960s in terms of musical tastes and fashion.


 
. . . sort of liberalization you see in the Prague Spring . . .
And not just the richer countries of eastern Europe, youth opposition could rise in smaller Soviet cities that the system has a class of 'professionals' who tell the rest of us what to do. In fact, this is a trait shared by both socialist and capitalist economies.

And the protests could include that the school skill which seems to be most valued is stiff, formalistic writing, capable of glossing over uncomfortable truths for whichever system!
 
Your challenge is to create a Soviet version of the counter-culture movement or some sort of an alternative counterculture group. What would their values be and how would the Soviet state respond
As for the "true" hippies, then here is also an interesting story. Let's start with the fact that the Soviet man in the street had little idea what it was. In the magazine "Crocodile" they drew caricatures, the propaganda branded them as "Bourgeois Degenerates", but no one really saw them. If the music of Beatles could be heard with a grief in half, then to see the hippies is like seeing Brigitte Bordeaux in a Soviet store (something incredible but beautiful).
As was pointed out in the article that I posted, the Soviet philistine of the '70s in many of its indicators was similar to the Hippy, and the Soviet youth of the' 60s led a different way of life. Large gatherings of the Hippies appeared in the 80s (when the entire Soviet system was in crisis, the adults were replaced, and the youth lost the meaning of life). However, two facts should be noted:
The first - the majority of subcultures in the USSR - "The dandies, that is, first of all imitate the West.
The second - Simultaneously with the Hippies, the Punks and the Metalheads spread out. As a result, the townsfolk did not always distinguish them.
 
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