Soviet Hippies and the Politics of Craziness  

On Thursday, April 23, Professor Juliane Fürst will give a talk "Liberating Madness – Punishing Insanity: Soviet Hippies and the Politics of Craziness." In her new research project Juliane Fürst explores the history of alternative youth movements in the former Soviet Union. The talk will take place 6:30 - 7:45 p.m. in Fahy Hall 236, on the Seton Hall University campus.

Juliane Fürst is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Bristol and currently completing an extensive oral history project on the history and character of the Soviet Hippie Movement. She has been affiliated with Columbia and Harvard universities and is the author of "Stalin's Last Generation" (Oxford University Press, 2010) and numerous articles on Soviet youth and youth culture. Her book received wide critical acclaim:

"[O]ffers convincing arguments for the transformation of the postwar generation of the Soviet Union. Furthermore, her book is a major contribution to a growing literature that helps our understanding of how and why the Soviet Union collapsed."
--The Historian

"A substantial contribution to the growing field of 'youth studies'...Stalin's Last Generation is an engaging, informative and thoroughly researched work of scholarship that deserves the attention of anyone interested in post-war Soviet culture in general, and youth culture in particular." --Slavic and East European Journal

"The book is a rich analysis of a generation that has undergone little previous study. ... Stalin's Last Generation is a very well-written monograph drawing on a variety of sources. ... The book makes a considerable contribution to existing research on cultural aspects of the Cold War era and to the current debate on what chronological framework can best serve our understanding of the character of postwar Soviet society." --Journal of Cold War Studies

This presentation, which derives from a manuscript on the history of hippies in the Soviet Union, looks at an important interface between the Soviet regime and the hippie underground: the field of madness. Hippies were often declared insane by the Soviet state and, like dissidents, confined in psychiatric hospitals, where they were diagnosed with schizophrenia or similar disorders. Yet this was not merely another instance where the brutal Soviet state suppressed and silenced its non-conformist youth. I argue instead that the ‘politics of craziness’ provide a useful prism to analyze the complicated interplay between the Soviet state and one of its most explicitly marginal groups. According to their ideology of irrationality, hippies celebrated madness as a desirable state, and voluntarily sought pathological diagnoses to get out of army service and distance themselves from other requirements of the state. The production, definition and borders of madness thus became a battlefield in which hippies mocked, parodied and rejected official norms, while at the same time making themselves vulnerable to the point of risking their collective and individual distinctiveness. Ultimately hippie interaction with the state in the field of madness tells an important story of the mechanisms, processes and characteristics of late socialism.

Professor Fürst's presentation is co-sponsored by the Russian and East European Studies Program and the Slavic Club.

Refreshments will be served.

This event is free and open to the public.