Flowers Through Concrete

Flowers Through Concrete is certain to remain one of the most important interpretative works in the field of late Soviet socialism. * Courtney Doucette, The Russian Review *
In Flowers Through the Concrete Julianne Fürst has provided us with nothing less than an alternative history of the late Soviet Union. This in itself is a tremendous achievement. * Alexandra Oberländer *
In her meticulously researched book, Juliane Fürst offers a superb analysis of this unexpected community of people who were differently Soviet and alternatively socialist. This is a game-changing book in the studies of Soviet socialism. Personal, riveting, and illuminating, Flowers through Concrete unpacks the complexity of late Soviet culture, powerfully shattering well-engrained stereotypes and simplified assumptions about Soviet people and their lives. The Soviet hippies never wrote their own history; Juliane Furst did an excellent job on their behalf. * Professor Serguei Oushakine, Princeton University *
Beneath its façade of gray conformity, late Soviet socialism turns out to have been a prodigious incubator of countercultures. Juliane Fürst is the ideal guide to what she calls "nonaligned behaviors," taking readers on a fascinating journey into the little-known world of Soviet hippies. Full of unexpected characters and insights, this wide-ranging, deeply researched, and beautifully illustrated book opens up new terrain in Soviet history and the global history of youth movements. * Professor Benjamin Nathans, University of Pennsylvania *
In this exquisitely written and engagingly visual book, Julianne Fürst opens to us the myriad ways in which self-identified hippies, like "unruly children," exasperated, repudiated, and critiqued late Soviet culture while relying upon and subtly engaging its substance. From music to madness to materiality, Fürst brings Soviet hippies to life within the flux and paradox of the last decades of the USSR. Her interpretation of her 134 interviews, sensitively gathered and delicately inferred, show the illuminating possibilities of oral history in the hands of a sympathetic and skilled historian. Encompassing trans-Soviet as well as transnational dimensions, the book is, as the author says, "a really good story" told with self-reflexivity and brilliance. * Professor Marsha Siefert, Central European University *
Juliane Fürst's Flowers through Concrete grapples with the transnational quality of the Soviet hippy movement within the closed borders of the USSR. Fürst does not assume that hippies were voting with their personal life choices either for or against socialism. Rather she shows how hippies' political ideas hardened over time as they became objects of state surveillance, police and medical actions. This book helps us re-think late Soviet culture in fascinating ways. * Professor Kate Brown, Massachusetts Institute of Technology *
This is a highly imaginative and wonderfully original study of what happened when flower power collided with Brezhnev-era officialdom, exploring how hippies carved out a space of freedom that many would not have imagined possible, given the repressive and ideological power of the party-state * Professor Stephen Smith, University of Oxford *