Dropping Out of Socialism: The Creation of Alternative Spheres in the Soviet Bloc

355 Pages·2016·4.28 MB·English

by  Josie McLellan

Dropping out of Socialism
Dropping out of Socialism
The Creation of Alternative Spheres in the
Soviet Bloc
Edited by
Juliane Fürst and Josie McLellan
LEXINGTON BOOKS
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-
Publication Data Names: Fürst, Juliane, 1973-editor. | McLellan, Josie, editor.
Title: Dropping out of socialism : the creation of alternative spheres in the Soviet bloc / edited by Juliane
Fürst and Josie McLellan.
Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016037411 (print) | LCCN 2016051561 (ebook) (print) | LCCN 2016051561 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781498525145 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781498525152 (Electronic) Subjects: LCSH: Europe,
Eastern—Social conditions. | Communism and individualism—Europe, Eastern. | Communism and
liberty—Europe, Eastern. | Post-communism—Europe, Eastern.
Classification: LCC HN380.7.A8 D76 2016 (print) | LCC HN380.7.A8 (ebook) | DDC 306.09437—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016037411
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for
Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: To Drop or Not to Drop?
Juliane Fürst
PART I: DROPPING OUT IN SPIRIT
1 The Biography of a Scandal: Experimenting with Yoga during Romanian
Late Socialism
Irina Costache
2 The Imaginary Elsewhere of the Hippies in Soviet Estonia
Terje Toomistu
3 Art and “Madness”: Weapons of the Marginal during Socialism in Eastern
Europe
Maria-Alina Asavei
4 Student Activists and Yugoslavia’s Islamic Revival: Sarajevo, 1970–
Madigan Andrea Fichter
PART II: DROPPING OUT INTELLECTUALLY
5 Reader Questionnaires in Samizdat Journals: Who Owns Aleksandr Blok?
Josephine von Zitzewitz
6 The Spirit of Pacifism: Social and Cultural Origins of the Grassroots Peace
Movement in the Late Soviet Period
Irina Gordeeva
7 Dropping Out of Socialism with the Commodore 64: Polish Youth, Home
Computers, and Social Identities
Patryk Wasiak
PART III: DROPPING OUT IN STYLE
8 “We All Live in a Yellow Submarine”: Dropping Out in a Leningrad
Commune
Juliane Fürst
9 Ignoring Dictatorship? Punk Rock, Subculture, and Entanglement in the
GDR
Jeff Hayton
10 “Under Any Form of Government, I Am Partisan”: The Siberian
Underground from Anti-Soviet to National-Bolshevist Provocation
Evgenyi Kazakov [Ewgeniy Kasakow]
PART IV: DROPPING OUT ECONOMICS
11 Living in the Material World: Money in the Soviet Rock Underground
Anna Kan
12 Socialism’s Empty Promise: Housing Vacancy and Squatting in the German
Democratic Republic
Peter Angus Mitchell
Conclusion: Dropping Out of Socialism? A Western Perspective
Joachim C. Häberlen
Bibliography
Index
About the Contributors
Acknowledgments
The editors would like to thank the UK Arts and Humanities Research Board
(AHRC) for their generous support of the project “Dropping out of Socialism:
The Creation of Alternative Sphere in the Soviet Bloc” (grant number
AH/I002502/1) with a generous Early Career Research Grant, which ran at the
University of Bristol from 2011 to 2015. The editors would further like to thank
the School of Humanities and Faculty of Arts at the University of Bristol, which
hosted the project. We are particularly grateful to Sam Barlow of the Bristol
Institute for Research in the Humanities and Arts (BIRTHA), who supported the
workshop “Dropping out of Socialism,” held 6–8 June 2014. Many of our
colleagues in Bristol and elsewhere have offered support and advice at various
stages of the project and advanced our thinking with their own research. We are
also very grateful to our copy editor Kim Friedlander for getting articles written
by people with so many different mother tongues into shape, Brian Hill, for his
enthusiasm and support for the book and Eric Kuntzman for patience and help in
the publishing process.
Introduction
To Drop or Not to Drop?
Juliane Fürst What does it mean to “drop out”? How does
one “drop out”? “Dropping out” from what? Google only
has two answers to such questions. Either the researcher
is referred to Timothy Leary and the many pages
dedicated to his famous LSD-hailing mantra of “dropping
out, turning on and tuning in.” Or paradoxically, the
reader is directed to the vast debate concerning school
drop-outs and the social and societal problems their
existence poses. The irony is, of course, that the latter
might very well be adherents of the former. What is
utopia to some is a failed existence to others. Clearly,
visions of what “dropping out” entails and how to
evaluate it differ significantly. Salvation for one is
condemnation for the other. Finding oneself can also
mean being lost. Cutting ties can be liberating, or the first
step to a future without choice.
As different as these and other interpretations of “dropping out” are, they have
one major assumption in common. Almost all existing discussions surrounding
“dropping out” are conducted with a highly developed capitalist Western world
in mind. Dropping out is a luxury that can only take place against a backdrop of
societal wealth. It is assumed that only in modern, liberal societies do people
have the choice to “drop out” and reject what so many in the developing world
are striving for: wealth, career, and success. Both poor people and people living
in authoritarian regimes are assumed not to enjoy the freedom to exit. What do
you rebel against, if you are busy feeding your family? Who would risk
everything to live a life which is not only materially uncomfortable, but highly
dangerous in an authoritarian or impoverished context?
While the question of “dropping out” in the developing, global South is the
subject of a separate book, this collected volume sheds light on whether, where,
and how people “dropped out” from the socialist East. Our contributors put an
end to the assumption that it was only possible to “drop out” out of Western
capitalism. They confirm a recent historiographical trend, which for the last
decade has suggested that socialist Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were
much more in step with Western postwar developments than the political need
for differentiation during the Cold War allowed us to see.1 Many aspects of
cultural and social life in the Western postwar years also left their marks in the
East: the global counterculture of the 1960s, the turn toward Eastern esotericism,
the anticapitalist boom of punk culture, changes in youth culture caused by
technological innovation, just to name a few. Of course, communist leaders did
not look benevolently upon such global phenomena, which they resolutely
interpreted as Western and bourgeois. As such these countercultures were both
persecuted and denied. They did not fit into the socialist canon and hence, so far
as the official narrative was concerned, they did not exist.
Yet even at the height of the Cold War, Western observers, of and in, Eastern
Europe were highly aware of such phenomena and the “drop-out cultures” they
spawned. International reporters and the staff of Radio Free Europe were
anxious to present them as harbingers of change and communist decline.2
Ironically, the end of the Cold War also meant the end of Western interest in
Eastern European nonconformists. Those who lived willfully outside the
mainstream have remained hidden. Most historical and political interest has
focused on either big politics or ordinary life, ignoring the marginal sections of
society, and in particular, those who made a virtue of being abnormal. For a long
time, while communist censorship existed, only Eastern European insiders knew
about “drop-outs,” because it was impossible to gather information on them
except by direct contact or word of mouth. Now their tales are freely available—
as oral history, written memoirs, or through state sources. But for many scholars,