Soviet 'Flower Children'. Ukrainian hippies vs the Soviet system

The wave of the hippie movement at the end of the 1960s also covered Ukraine. But only the love, freedom and joy of life, which hippies all over the world aspired to, acquired their shades in the conditions of the totalitarian system of the USSR.

How Ukrainian hippies differed from "Western" ones, what role did they play on the way to Independence and what are they protesting against today - on the example of the life story of Lviv hippie, human rights activist, writer and organizer of the first political demonstration in Ukraine during the "perestroika" period, Alik Olisevych.

With mother's milk

Alik Olisevych had reasons to dislike the Soviet system long before he was born. His parents - Taisia ​​and Oleksandr Olisevych - were deported to Nazi Germany for forced labor during the Second World War. There, not far from Berlin, the couple had a daughter, Galina. During the offensive of the Red Army in 1945, the Olisevychs were divided: Oleksandr was mobilized to the first ranks of the liberation army. "Cannon fodder. Behind, as the father told, Enkavedists were walking and shooting everyone who did not want to participate in the offensive. Surprisingly, the father survived," Alik recounts.

After the liberation of Berlin, Oleksandr Olisevych was sentenced to 10 years in prison under the article "treason to the Motherland", Taisia ​​was imprisoned for 5 years after returning to Kyiv, and little Halinka was sent to an orphanage.

Alik's parents served their terms "from bell to bell." But the Soviet government did not allow Oleksandr to move to Lviv for another two years, where Taisia ​​and her daughter were waiting for him. The family was able to reunite only in 1957. The following year, their son Oleg (Alik) was born.

The KGB at the CM of the Ukrainian SSR received data on the involvement of a separate part of the so-called Soviet youth. the "hippie" movement.

Alika, according to him, has been fascinated by the image of Jesus Christ since he was a child: "We, in the west of Ukraine... had images in every house: Mother of God, Jesus Christ. And I really liked the face of Jesus Christ. When I saw long hair like that, I already knew on a conscious, subconscious level that I wanted such long hair." Little Olisevych's style and worldview were also shaped by romantic films about freedom-loving, brave Indians in the American prairies.

Fragment of a message from the KGB of the Ukrainian SSR to the Central Committee of the CP(b)U, May 20, 1969

Alik had just started studying at school when his mother Taisia died in December 1965. The boy was sent to a boarding school in Bryukhovychy, near Lviv. It was there that the history of his protests began, although childish and unconscious, but already anti-systemic.

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From the third grade, Olisevych began studying in Lviv, but he ran away from home repeatedly, so he, at the age of nine, was registered in the children's room of the police. A year later, Alik first entered the "re-education" program for difficult teenagers in the Drohobytsk military unit (Lviv region). The next time he is sent to Rava-Rusk near Lviv. There, the boy met older hippie boys, from whom he learned style, knowledge and an example of how to resist drills. "Patlated friends" introduced Alik to western music, an informal Lviv hangout, obtained foreign press and self-published.

In the same 1968, Olisevych got his hands on an issue of the Soviet magazine "Around the World" with an article about the emergence of the hippie movement in the United States. Since then, Alik's style and protest began to acquire conscious ideological features.

Father Oleksandr never particularly supported Alik's freedom-loving antics. But only in adulthood, Olisevych Jr. realized that his father's strictness was an attempt to protect his son from punishment by the system.

The Russian KGB authorities continue to take measures to identify and suppress attempts by individual hostile elements to use "hippies" for anti-Soviet purposes.

While young Olisevych was blending into the community and getting to know the hippie culture, the KGB's attention was already drawn to Lviv's informals. American historian William Risch writes in his research: "On November 7 [1970], the anniversary of the October Revolution [...] Vyacheslav Yeresko, a probable provocateur of the KGB with a dubious past, tried to speak in fascist form before a large gathering of hippies near Lviv." In the same month, Yeresk was detained for illegal possession of weapons. This episode sparked an investigation into other members of the hippie community. Some were fired from their jobs and expelled from educational institutions.

The story about radical groups of hippies in Lviv spread to other republics of the Soviet Union. In June of the following year, the authorities allowed the youth to hold a protest against the war in Vietnam in front of the American embassy in Moscow. But as soon as the activists gathered, security forces began mass arrests: Olisevych considers this episode a provocation by the KGB in order to determine the number of hippies in Moscow.

Despite the preventive measures carried out in 1969–1972, there are still cases of imitation of "hippies" among some of the youth...

Olisevych met Yeresk in 1974 and immediately understood their difference: "Our generation, which was already standing on natural hip foundations, stayed away from these people." Instead, Alik was a member of another group of hippies, who organized themselves in 1968 and called themselves the "Holy Garden" republic. 17-year-old rock musician Ilko Lemko was elected "president" of the republic. "We had a minister of culture and a minister of sports there. That was a game, fun, a protest alternative to the Communist Party and the Komsomol," Alik recalls.

And although the "citizens" of the "Holy Garden" used political slogans (such as "The dog bit the CPSU") and symbols (the trident on the flags), their methods differed from their radical predecessors. The protest against the hippie system of the new generation was expressed through demonstrative non-acceptance of the canons of the Soviet regime, through an outrageous lifestyle: "Wearing tattered torn jeans, painted faces, Indian clothing. They [the authorities] did not know how to deal with it. It was a challenge and a protest against generally accepted norms of behavior and morality."

Alik divides the youth outside the hippy group into those who sympathized with the hippies, but did not join, and others - who made a career for themselves along the Komsomol or party lines. He considers the latter to be adaptive. They could not even believe in party ideals, but serve them: "We called them "squares", that is, when a person cannot see anything beyond his square." Informals, according to Alik, tried to get "people of the system" out of their squares and show that there are many more interesting things around instead of "sitting from morning to evening in party committees, studying statutes."

"The hippie movement was generally apolitical. We were not nationalist. We had people of different faiths. It didn't bother us. We simply respected the individual," - the "Holy Garden" community included various people. But, according to Olisevych, in addition to hippie values, they were also united by their dislike of the Communist Party and the Soviet system. On this basis, closer to the end of the 80s, a politically active section began to form among Lviv hippies.

..."hippies", under favorable conditions, tend to provoke mass antisocial manifestations.

For Olisewicz, the impetus for social and political activity was the formation of the independent trade union "Solidarity" in Poland in 1980.

Alik tried to establish contact with the "West" through letters to the editors of Czech, Polish, and Yugoslav publications; through communication with tourists in Lviv. One of his letters was published in the Yugoslav magazine "Džuboks" in 1982. Because of this, Olisevych was repeatedly interrogated by the KGB.

"We were different from Western, American hippies. They had more freedom, more democracy, and we lived in a totalitarian system. We did not want to live in that prison of nations. And we had such a need for our Ukraine to be separate from the Soviet Union, - explains Alik. - We were looking for similar ones in other republics. And here, the closest to us were not even the Russians, we found an understanding with the Baltics: Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians."

Since travel in the Soviet Union, unlike abroad, was affordable, the Lviv hippie community formed a friendship with the Baltic informal hangout from the 60s. In August 1987, Alik Olisevych and his friend Oleg Salo took part in a protest action before the signing of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact in Riga, Latvia.

"We approach the city center - a sea of ​​people, a sea of ​​police, everything is blocked. Let's look at those slogans: Latvians in Latvian and in Russian "Freedom of Latvia", "Freedom Latvia", "Freedom to political prisoners". I saw people carrying flowers to Milda's monument, as they call it. That's right there - the Ikarus were overtaken by the police, they made a gap of almost five meters and the cops are standing in two or three rows. One man at a time, they parted, let them in, you walked like that for thirty meters to the monument and laid flowers - they were Latvian. And other people saw it and clapped, shouted, the cops arrested them there, they tried to take the cameras away from those who were taking pictures. Radio Liberty of America said that there were about ten thousand people - it was the first political action in the Soviet Union. The biggest one was in Latvia", - Alik and Oleg also managed to lay flowers.

The action in Latvia inspired Alik and Oleg to organize a demonstration for human rights in Lviv on September 20 of the same year, on the day of the city. Without warning anyone, on the same day they went to Virmenska Street, where informal youth gathered at that time.

"It was both spontaneous and prepared. As we write, the girls are already writing various slogans with lipstick: "Glasnost", "USSR - America - nuclear disarmament", "Freedom", "Alternative military service" was because we did not want to join the army, to be used as cannon fodder, say, in Afghanistan, about 30 activists joined the young men. - When we passed through the center for the second time, maybe two hundred people were already walking behind us. People People were tired and wanted freedom. I'm not saying, as we can now say, "independence", there were those who wanted Ukraine to be Ukraine by itself."

During the action, the police repeatedly tried to detain the participants, but passers-by blocked the path of the security forces - and they did not dare to make strict arrests: "They are showing off for the West, as if we have a democracy. On the other hand, they didn't know how to deal with us. They could arrest for 10-15 days - for appearance, or for a year or two for not working anywhere. Well, also for anti-Soviet propaganda, but we were very careful."

Demonstration for human rights in Lviv, September 20, 1987

Shortly after the demonstration, Polish activists got in touch. With them - from "Wolność i Pokój" and "Solidarność" - Lviv informals began to hold joint protests. In the same year, contact with the Czechs was established. At the invitation of Polish hip dissidents, in 1988, Alik Olisewicz went abroad for the first time. The second time - in Czechoslovakia next year. Having visited places where hippies gathered, this country became a model for Alik for a long time, "because there it was more free to express one's ideas and views." But later Alik became convinced that even in Czechoslovakia, the authorities suppressed protests, and the police arrested long-haired young men even simply for appearing in public places.

Unlike "fartsovshikov" and "beatlomaniacs", "hippies" have their own ideological platform.

For a long time, the Soviet authorities did not publicly admit that the fascination with rock music and hippie culture has an ideological basis and is gaining a mass character: "They said that young people are just having fun, freaking out, that it's just a fashion. And for a long time, this topic was not raised in the press at all."

According to Alik, the authorities became seriously interested in hippies after Yury Andropov took office as General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU. Propaganda articles in local newspapers portrayed hippies as fascists and drug addicts. "But by doing so, they recognized that there were hippies in the Soviet Union. And it was another level of struggle against this movement," Alik notes.

In 1984, he was detained on the street by people from the Komsomol operative squad and brought to the station for an interview. The journalist asked Olisevych about his views, why he was dressed like that: "I told them everything I thought. But I didn't expect that they would twist everything like that." The interview was included in the program, which was broadcast to the entire Soviet Union, Alik's direct speech was preceded by a reprehensible summary of the presenters and no less reprehensible comments from seemingly ordinary citizens: "There were such: "They should be jailed!", "This should be stopped!" , "Parasites!", "Addicts!". Now they [the authorities] were clearly turning society against people like us."

...in the interests of the formation of "independent social forces and movements" in the USSR.

After the demonstration in Lviv in 1987, Moscow dissident Oleksandr Rubchenko offered Alik Olisevych to head the branch of the human rights group "Trust" in Lviv. Later, the Lviv branch became independent and changed its name to "Trust. Between East and West". Human rights activists focused only on Ukrainian issues: respect for human rights, provision of alternative military service within Ukraine. The organization helped the illegally convicted, sought the abolition of torture in detention centers, protested against the war in Afghanistan.

"Trust. "Between East and West" began to gather around itself organizations and public figures from the political, religious, cultural, and environmental spheres. Dissidents led by Vyacheslav Chornovol established contact with Alik.

With the advent of Independence, the human rights and public activities of Lviv hippie activists continued.

Eternal protest in Ukraine

Lviv. July 2020. Alik Olisevych walks the streets of his hometown - and his affiliation with the hippies does not reveal much: now everyone can look outrageous. But the hair still reaches the shoulders, it is girded by a hair-dresser just as it was 50 years ago. Olisevych has a bag with "The Beatles" over his shoulder, a pendant with a hippy symbol of peace and a cross around his neck. Alik's steps and gestures are wide and free. He sees Lviv as he and his friends dreamed of in their youth: there are a lot of art and cultural institutions, various music on the streets. But Alik's rebellion continues: "Long hair for me is still a symbol of freedom and protest against all this madness around, against a consumerist lifestyle and material temptations."

Currently, Alik Olisevych is retired and works as a lighting operator at the Lviv National Academic Theater of Opera and Ballet named after Solomiya Krushelnytska. He continues his human rights, writing and public activities.

Alik Olisevych on the steps of the Dominican Cathedral in Lviv. 2020 is the year

(The material was prepared as part of the joint oral history project of the "Territory of Terror" museum and the NGO "Post Bellum" with the support of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic)

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