Russian Active Measures

The KGB, College Students, and Soviet Hippies

While observing the events in Czechoslovakia in 1967–1968, KGB officials emphasized the active involvement of Czechoslovak youth and college students in the Prague Spring.11 In this context, KGB analysts realized an urgent necessity to seriously investigate various youth social groups in the Soviet Union. According to former KGB officers and archival documents, the most volatile, ideologically unreliable, and susceptible to Western (especially American) influences was the group of college students,12 a notion that was consistent with the Czech trends of 1967–1968. As early as May 1967, immediately after Yuri Andropov was appointed the head of the KGB, the intelligence analysts initiated a series of research projects to study various Soviet college student groups. The KGB realized that the official sociological data provided by Komsomol ideologists and researchers from various departments of social sciences and humanities in Soviet universities (i.e., History of the Communist Party, Marxist-Leninist Philosophy, Political Economy, and Scientific Communism) were extremely orthodox, cautious and, overall, unreliable. Therefore, the KGB administration decided to employ various non-orthodox sources of information that provided them with necessary information.

The KGB operatives selected the most articulate representatives of the college student community who were ready to share their sociological analyses with the state police. They prepared special reports/surveys of Soviet college student groups, which the KGB sent on to the Communist Party leadership. The KGB department in Kyiv sponsored a special study involving Odesa college students, which was disseminated in 1968 among all KGB officers and the party leadership as a “model” survey of a college group in Soviet Ukraine.13 Interestingly, the most controversial and shocking observation of this 1968 survey, emphasizing the apolitical and cynical character of the students and their gradual distancing from the communist ideology, were used by the KGB in their active measures to counter the “dangerous ideological influences” in Soviet youth culture through the entire decade of the 1970s.14 Many trends in youth behavior noted by that KGB survey of college students in 1968 survived throughout the 1980s and spread to other more numerous and much younger categories of Soviet Ukrainian youth, a phenomenon that required much more sophisticated and diverse active measures to eradicate it.

The 1968 survey highlighted the increasing political indifference, apathy, and the cynical attitude toward life among Soviet college students.15 The students openly demonstrated their scepticism about the party and Komsomol leadership and their own membership in these organizations, which they used mainly for self-promotion purposes to advance their careers in college and enhance their opportunities on the job market.16 According to the survey, the students’ “encounters with the party and Komsomol leadership at colleges gave the impression that the Communist Party and Komsomol organizations were led by completely ignorant people who hopelessly lagged behind the modern requirements of life.” As the author of the survey noted, “the college Communist Party leadership’s ignorance of fashionable music, of the views of the favorite heroes of the youth, of the youth’s expectations from their senior colleagues, and a lack of cultural knowledge among the communist leaders—[all this] leads to their students’ perceptions of them as dogmatists and reactionaries.”17

At the same time, college students exhibited their own shocking ignorance of Marxist and Leninist philosophy, as well as of the modern trends in Western philosophy, culture, and political thought. They tried to compensate for this by listening to the broadcasts of Western radio stations and by reading the literature available at the time. They discussed what they learned with their classmates during their drinking parties either in the dorms or in bars. As a result of these experiences, students developed their own notions of the Communist Party as “the sole ruling corrupt political organization” that routinely “re-produce[d] the Soviet bourgeoisie.”18 They were ready to accept the Western propaganda’s clichés about the “degeneration of the Communist Party” in the Soviet Union. According to the 1968 survey, the students no longer believed that there were “real communists” anywhere. The very word “communist” was discredited among the Soviet youth.19 The Komsomol lost its ideological control over college students together with “its prestige and attractiveness to young people.” The main reason behind the Komsomol’s ideological failure rested in its inability to discover new forms of working with youth, and its absolute dependence on the institutional, party, and trade union administrations.20 Students were sceptical about the anti-capitalist propaganda pouring from Soviet television and radio. They tried to avoid watching and listening to any kind of ideological shows that criticised the Western way of life.21

The 1968 survey designed to enlighten KGB officers also revealed that college students in the cities of eastern and southern Ukraine, such as Odesa and Dnipropetrovsk, exhibited their complete Russification. They “called the Ukrainian language a ‘kolkhoz tongue,’ considering its public usage ridiculous and bewildering” and arguing that the “knowledge of Ukrainian language is unnecessary” because of its provincial nature: “[this is] a rural language, the language of ignorant and poorly educated people.” They resented the idea that southern Ukrainian cities, like Odesa, were to be Ukrainized and expressed their negative attitude toward Kyiv, “a city and a national center, where [Ukrainian] nationalists resided.” In addition, the author of the survey emphasized that “even the rural [Ukrainian-speaking] students in [the city] turned to Russian language because they wanted to appear more cultured and civilized.”22

The survey’s detailed and quite convincing description of the massive commercialization and Americanization of the youth culture in cities like Odesa appears to be the most astonishing revelation for researchers. For many students, the labels and the expression “made in the USA” became the benchmarks of how good quality products and, more broadly, successful economic and social developments could be measured. They strongly believed that the Soviet economic conditions did not leave any space for the entrepreneurial talents of Soviet people to develop and become effective drivers of the socialist enterprise. The youth contended that, like in the United States, economic competition was necessary to force out low quality products from the Soviet market. Students appreciated the freedom of opinion and expression, which they thought existed only in the West. In their minds, the main criterion of “human success was defined by the level of his/her personal material prosperity (well-being).”23

It is noteworthy that, on the eve of the September 1968 Plenum of the CPSU that focused on the problems of transition to the new system of planning, the city youth discussed the revival of private entrepreneurship in light industry and the service sphere. College students preferred the black market to lecture halls, demonstrating a high propensity for commercial activities. They routinely joked that “the Americans are wise people, and therefore they have no ruling Communist Party, [only a market].”24

The author of the 1968 survey further argued that beyond commercialization, the hero cult was additional evidence of the effective penetration of American values into the consciousness of Soviet youth:

A contemporary young boy and a girl needed a real hero (as a role model), but our films showed them either unusual people in unusual situations, or personalities that were so dull and boring that they could not be an example for emulation. In this light, the heroes of Western films, strong handsome characters who solved their problems with a punch, unknowingly became the models for emulation. After watching the film The Magnificent Seven, half of college male students developed the walking style of Chris (the major character of the film). The youth love strength; that was why the body-building fashion, which came from the West and was initially criticized by our ideologists, achieved an unprecedented popularity in the country. Regarding this cult of strength, it is noteworthy that we witness a surprising rise of sympathy with fascism among some students. Agreeing with its blunders (such as the annihilation of Jews), they admire the attractive appearance of tall and handsome Arians (ariitsy), parading in the military marches …25

KGB analysts also identified another characteristic of the collective portrait of college students from Odesa—antisemitism and racist attitudes, especially toward African college students. Paradoxically, they physically attacked students from Africa, calling them “black-ass people” (chornozhopye), simultaneously supporting Czech students during the Prague Spring, and openly expressing their affinity with American jazz and beat-music.26

Besides such cases of racism, the idealization of fascist leaders, and antisemitism, the KGB noted the rise of Ukrainian nationalism and Zionism among college students in other eastern Ukrainian cities. In some Russian-speaking cities of eastern Ukraine, such as Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk, the KGB officers recorded frequent cases of Ukrainian nationalism. They attributed the rise of nationalism in Dnipropetrovsk, for instance, to demographic and political developments, following the 1956 sensational Twentieth Party Congress. According to a KGB decision, former political prisoners who had been indicted for “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism” and had served their prison terms in the Gulag were released. However, they were not allowed to return to their homes in western Ukraine. These prisoners, identified as banderovtsy in official documents, were either members or supporters of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), and/or members of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church (Uniate or the Ukrainian Greek-rite Catholic Church) from the Trans-Carpathian and Galician regions of western Ukraine.27 After 1945, when the Soviet Army suppressed these patriotic and anti-Soviet movements, thousands of adherents were exiled to Siberia and Kazakhstan. KGB officials tried to prevent any contacts between these former political prisoners and their homeland in western Ukraine. By the mid-sixties, many of these ex-prisoners settled in eastern, more Russified regions of Ukraine. The KGB tried to regiment the movements of Ukrainian nationalists and dilute them by more diverse, and less Ukrainian, people of the Dnipropetrovsk and Donetsk oblasts. By 1967, 1,041 former political prisoners who were labeled “Ukrainian nationalists” from western Ukraine had settled in the Dnipropetrovsk oblast alone.28

This posed a danger to ideological and political control of eastern Ukraine because ex-prisoners resided in strategically important cities and their vicinity, such as Dnipropetrovsk and Kharkiv. The amalgamation of several factors, including a cultural influx of college students from western Ukraine to the Dnipropetrovsk oblast and ex-prisoners’ influences, provoked a serious international scandal, involving a group of local young patriotic Ukrainian-speaking poets. They complained about the official politics of Russification in eastern Ukraine. They sent copies of their “Letter from the Creative Youth of Dnipropetrovsk,” in which they documented the KGB’s suppression of Ukrainian patriots and massive Russification of Soviet Ukraine, to various offices of the Communist Party, the Komsomol, and Soviet organizations and colleges in Kyiv and Dnipropetrovsk in the period from August to December of 1968.29 Ultimately, the letter reached Ukrainian émigré centers abroad. The following spring, foreign radio stations, such as Liberty, included the text of this letter in their broadcasts.30 In 1969–1970, the KGB managed to supress this group of young Ukrainian patriots.31

Until 1990, criminal cases focused on Ukrainian nationalism had always been connected to the activities of college students in Soviet Ukraine. Their “Americanization” was a serious concern for KGB officers, a process that was shaped by new forms of daily consumption of Western (in many cases, American) cultural products, especially popular music. The KGB associated this process with the emergence of hippies in Soviet Ukraine, considering the imposition of American influences on Soviet youth a political threat to the Soviet system.32

In Ukraine, the KGB concentrated on the hippie movement as early as 1968. The first official KGB report about this movement was submitted to the party leadership in Kyiv on 20 May 1969, stating that the followers of this movement were discovered in Kyiv, Simferopol, Luhansk, Odesa, Lviv, Rivne and other Ukrainian cities. They were predominantly teenagers and young adults, students of high schools and college students. According to this document, those hippies emulated Western lifestyles to the last detail: “Some of them, using various excuses, try to avoid military service, criticize the Soviet order, lead immoral lives, use drugs, systematically establish contacts with foreigners, and are involved in black market transactions (fartsovka). […] Gatherings of hippies are held in private apartments and, as a rule, are accompanied by parties with alcohol and listening to new releases of foreign jazz music that are frequently ended in orgies.”33 The transgressor established contacts with like-minded people in Ukraine and outside the republic. To better explain the hippie phenomenon to party leaders, KGB analysts interjected excerpts from an analytical article on American hippies, written by an American social psychologist from Yale University, Kenneth Keniston, and published in Russian translation in the American magazine Amerika.34 The Soviet leadership immediately ordered the KGB to design active measures regarding this new cultural phenomenon popular among the Soviet youth.

As a response, on 16 February 1971, KGB officials submitted another, more detailed, report to party leaders with a description of active measures to curtail this movement.35 The KGB intended to conduct these operations in the cities where this movement originated—in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Lviv, Dnipropetrovsk, Odesa, Donetsk, Voroshylovhrad, Zaporizhzhia, Simferopol, Rivne, Poltava, Kirovohrad, Sumy, and Chernivtsy. The members of hippie groups were divided into two social groups: 1) fartsovshchiks (black marketers) and 2) bitlomans, the fans of “beat-music” (Anglo-American rock-n-roll).36 The KGB’s main concern, however, laid in the sphere of ideology: “While the hippies in the West protest against bourgeois society’s rules, their emulators in our country advocate the revision of moral and ethical norms of the socialist way of life, striving to create their own moral norms.”37 Despite the fact that the majority of the movement’s members were college students (including college dropouts), the leaders were more mature individuals, who explained the emergence of hippies in the USSR by political motives. According to the KGB, they positioned themselves as the articulators of oppositionist ideas and formulators of a program of activities. To illustrate the political danger of these people, KGB operatives quoted “one of the authorities” among the Kharkiv hippies, A. L. Kleshcheiev who explained to the KGB officer:

… We advocate democracy, the free choice of moral norms (svoboda nravov), free speech, freedom of creativity, freedom to propagandize our own ideas, freedom to demonstrate, free love, and behavior unlimited by moral constraint. A society should not interfere in the [development of] personality: if I do not impose on other people, I do what I want to do—I can sit or lie down where I want; if there is the possibility to live without working—I avoid working, because our needs are minimal; I want to be dressed in what I’d like or go naked; I want to spend the night where I’d like, and travel where I like. Because these [options] are unavailable to us, my friends and I believe that our [Soviet] authorities do wrong things […] we have no full freedom and democracy; and people who have power to change [this situation] are narrow-minded and do not understand our demands. We conclude that at this stage, under this political system [in the USSR], it is unlikely that we can achieve our goals […] the West seems to us more progressive and democratic than our [political] regime …38

In their reports to Ukraine’s party boss Petro Shelest, KGB officials suggested that the hippies’ behavior in public was unacceptable. Drinking, gambling, drug abuse, black market transactions (fartsovka), and sexual perversions became habitual for the hippies. Their gatherings at restaurants, cafes, and city parks began to attract public attention because of their obscene language, improper appearance, and offensive behavior. The KGB also informed Shelest that these individuals attempted to avoid the military draft and any type of socially useful work, lived the lives of vagabonds, and engaged in seditious conversations. According to KGB analysts, this behavior was shaped by the ideologically harmful influence of foreign radio broadcasting that the hippies systematically listened to.39 The major KGB concern was to prevent the hippies from organizing and establishing an intercity communication network. There was information about such attempts when in 1969 the representatives of various hippie groups in Kyiv, Odesa, Kharkiv, and Voroshylovhrad tried to organize the first republican, and then all-Union, congresses that would help unite all hippies in one centralized organization. The objective of this organization would be sharing literature and art to popularize the ideas and the philosophy of hippies. The KGB operatives infiltrated the most active groups, undermining their efforts from inside.40

As a result of these “prophylactic measures” against hippies in 1970, KGB officers were able to offer their bosses a general picture of hippie groups and their origin. Twenty members of two hippie groups in Kharkiv served as the model for their investigations. The KGB learned that their initial impulse for gathering together came from their passion for western (rock) music. In 1968, two students, A. Soloviev and A. Makarenko, and one dropout, Yu. Shatunovskii, from the Kharkiv State University, created an “amateur club of fans” of rock music that in 1968 and 1969 organized numerous so-called “psycho-concerts” in their private apartments and in the basements and stairways of public places. According to KGB reports, the ideologically dangerous events included music by foreign music stars, including “songs of obscene content, questionable in a political and artistic sense.” The KGB emphasized that these individuals planned to unite up to 2000 people, and they even wrote a program that stipulated the rights and duties of its members. The conspiratorial club “Society of Fighters for the Flaming Heart of Danko” (Klub bortsov plamennykh serdets Danko) was named after Danko, a character from Maxim Gorky’s Old Izergil, who sacrificed himself, saving his people with his flaming heart. The club members adopted a song performed by the the British rock band “The Animals” as its anthem.41

In October of 1969, Makarenko and Shatunovskii made an attempt to organize a demonstration of their followers at the Dzerzhynskyi Square in downtown Kharkiv. They planned to publicly demand the official recognition of their hippie organization by local authorities. The KGB conducted a special operation to curtail these activities, arresting ten Kharkiv hippie activists. Similarly, in April of 1970 in Voroshylovhrad, nine participants of a local hippie group were arrested for using drugs in public. The same month, the KGB reported that a hippie group from Zaporizhzhia organized a march in the city, attempting to popularize their ideas. Also Lviv had their own share of hippies: in December of 1970, 22 local hippies composed a statute (ustav) of the hippie club, planning a similar action. In April of 1971, 30 hippies from Ivano-Frankivsk organized a rock concert at the city’s central square. The evening of 18 June 1971 in Chernivtsi became memorable for the arrest of 17 hippies by KGB operatives. To celebrate Paul McCartney’s birthday, the hippies had marched in the streets, carrying hand-made banners with his portrait, completely paralyzing Chernivtsi’s downtown. Numerous arrests by the KGB eventually ceased these public actions, but not the movement itself.42 It kept growing, especially in the capital city of Kyiv.

By late 1969, the KGB discovered more than 170 hippies in Kyiv and uncovered their “president.” S. Baiev, a dropout from the Kyiv Pedagogical Institute, tried to unite and consolidate the movement in Kyiv. Baiev’s behavior was rather provocative. He maintained contacts with foreign tourists and journalists, especially with Americans, and publicly criticized the Soviet system. He and his followers condemned the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet troops, expressing their desire to escape abroad.43 Despite KGB active and prophylactic measures (arrests, expulsions from the Komsomol and colleges, interrogations of the participants and their parents), the hippie groups in Kyiv survived. In 1974, another hippie leader and a student of the Department of Biology at the Kyiv State University, Oleh Pokalchuk, reenergized the movement, accentuating the religious (spiritual) dimension in the life of Ukrainian hippies. Pokalchuk conceptualized a “Buddhist commune” as a new hippie model for his followers. During 1974–1975, the KGB documented active interactions of Ukrainian hippies with Orthodox Christian and Baptist communities, and the growing Krishnaite movement in Soviet Ukraine. These links helped them eventually connect with their foreign co-religionists.44

On 11 October 1979, in his official report to Volodymyr Shcherbytskyi, Vitalii Fedorchuk, head of the Ukrainian KGB, acknowledged the KGB failure to stop the “hippisty” movement in Ukraine. According to his statistics, the KGB recorded 80 criminal cases launched against those “who imitated Western hippies” in various regions of Ukraine: Lviv 48, Donetsk 6, Crimea 5, Poltava 5, Zaporizhzhia 5, Dnipropetrovsk 4, Kyiv 2, Kherson 2, Ternopil 2, Chernihiv 1. Among them, 65 people were between 16 and 25 years of age, and 15 people between 26 and 30 years of age; 64 were males, and 16 were females.45 Thirteen of them had been “targets of active KGB measures;” 10 were “involved in ideologically harmful actions;” 3 were indicted for criminal offences; 8 were arrested for manufacturing and selling drugs; 27 were arrested for using drugs; 15 were receiving medical treatment in mental institutions; 10 were “arrested for avoiding military service; and approximately 50% of all Ukrainian hippies did not study or work.”46 As late as April 1987, the KGB still confirmed the existence of the “hippies-pacifists” in Ukraine who called themselves “Sistema.” Overall, there were 60 hippies in the republic (mainly in Dnipropetrovsk, Lviv, Odesa, and Simferopol), and 30 in Kyiv.47

KGB reports offered the Ukrainian communist leadership a relatively thorough sociological analysis of the hippie movement and KGB active measures that were employed from 1969 to 1987 to curtail the movement in Ukraine. Based on interviews with former hippies, one such report stated:

On the one hand, there are young people, who (due to their young age) aspire to something unusual and romantic, reading a certain type of literature […] and are keen on their crazy ideas and colorful clothes […] (which allow them to stand out among their peers). On the other hand, there is another group of young people who understand very well the incompatibility of the hippies’ ideas with the Soviet system, nevertheless, joining the movement consciously. [These] people […] make money using this movement, i.e., selling clothes (“fartsuiut barakhlom”), drugs, and other things […] [they] criticize (“khaiut”) all Soviet things, calling them “sovdela” (Soviet stuff) […] [and] want to escape to the West, inciting others to do the same. […] many of them maintain connections with people living abroad, write and send letters abroad; they have relatives or friends there, or routinely establish contacts with foreigners visiting the city […] In their milieu, they propagandize “free love,” freedom of behavior and actions, parasitism and reluctance to obey (Soviet) laws and moral norms, calling this coercion […] They insist that “we have no democracy if we have only one ruling political party,” and that people should enjoy their lives instead of wasting it for the state …48

For the KGB, the major threat of the hippie movement seemed to be the politicization of Soviet youth and the emergence of political practices among them. The KGB identified this as the “institutionalization” of Soviet hippies, which was ultimately a dangerous alternative to Soviet youth institutions such as the Komsomol. KGB operatives feared the spread of this movement: the tentacles of the underground hippie clubs reached all major industrial cities. For instance, in February 1971 in Kirovohrad, local hippies organized the anti-Komsomol “Union of Free Youth” that included 20 members. They planned to organize a mass demonstration of the “free youth” of Kirovohrad, designed to mobilize young people for a collective fight for “freedom of speech, free love, and freedom of demonstrations.”49 The active measures of the local KGB office, including the infiltration of this hippie organization by KGB undercover officers, managed to prevent these activities.

The ideological justification for KGB covert operations against the youth culture were the hippies’ alleged connections to fascism and neo-fascism portrayed as an intrinsic feature that underpinned the Prague Spring. In the KGB analysis, the hippies were active collaborators of pro-fascist elements in Czechoslovakia who allegedly inspired the 1968 Prague Spring. Similar claims related to socialist Hungary, where hippie groups were arrested for allegedly collecting intelligence for one of the Western diversion spy centers. In 1971, the KGB exploited the same ideological arguments when analyzing the activities of Ukraine’s hippies who allegedly spread fascist ideas. The declarations made by Oleksandr Balykin, a student at the Mykolaiv Ship-Building Institute, about the similarities between the modern youth’s worldview and Hitler’s ideas discarding conscience, shame, and morality, served as supporting evidence for the KGB. Its analysis also included a Ukrainian hippie group from Lviv as an example of this connection, highlighting their “black ties,” crosses, and swastikas that the hippies displayed on numerous occasions publicly.50 The alleged links between the hippie and fascist ideologies gave the KGB carte blanche to act aggressively and curtail the political activism of youth in Soviet Ukraine.

Clearly, the Czech youth political activities in 1968 forced the KGB to think about the Ukrainian hippies’ political activism in similar terms. The commercialization of Soviet youth culture and disco music that became extremely popular among Soviet youth seemed innocent in comparison with political statements made by the hippies and their attempts to organize. The KGB arrested hundreds of Ukrainian imitators of American hippies and expelled them from universities and the Komsomol all over Ukraine. Ukrainian punks who were similarly portrayed as neo-Nazi presented the same threat to the Soviet system, the Soviet Ukrainian culture, and the Soviet identity of Komsomol members.