On June 1 of every year, the Russian capitals hippie community congregates under a tall solitary pine — which everyone calls an oak, for some reason — to remember tragic events of 40 years ago. In 1971, there were about a 1,000 hippies in Moscow. They used to gather at such favorite haunts as the Psychodrome” near the old building of Moscow State University; the Square” outside what is now the Moscow mayor’s office, near the Yuri Dolgorukiy statue; beside the Pushkin memorial; and at an underground pedestrian crossing on Gorky Street, which has since been renamed to Tverskaya Street.On May 28, 1971, each of these places was visited by plain-clothed KGB officers. After presenting their KGB credentials, they invited the hippies to stage a protest against the Vietnam War outside the U.S. embassy in Moscow. Smart people in the Soviet government were asking for their help in fighting American militarism, the hippies were told. It was agreed that on June 1, Moscow’s hippies would gather at their usual spots with anti-war slogans, and that the plain-clothed people would take them to the embassy and organize the whole protest. As agreed, on June 1 the hippies turned up with their pacifist slogans. Several busses arrived; the unsuspecting hippies were invited to get in, which they did. The busses then trundled off, but not to the U.S. embassy. Their destination was police stations. The name of each passenger was recorded in a voluminous book with the word HIPI written in large letters on the cover. Everyone whose name was recorded then had his or her entire lives destroyed, as part of a deliberate and methodical campaign. Of the 500 people detained that day, about half were sent to serve with the Soviet forces on the Chinese border. A hundred or so were clamped into psychiatric hospitals. Dozens were jailed on various charges.Two died while serving in the Army. Another two died in a nuthouse. Two hanged themselves. Those who survived effectively became unemployable. The government hoped that was the end of the Russian hippies. It was wrong.
Posted on: Thu, 06 Mar 2014 06:06:29 +0000