Soviet Hippies Rock Culver City

The Wende Museum's "Socialist Flower Power: Soviet Hippies Culture" explores an unintended consequence of Soviet state media. Haight-Asbury's hippies, seen as enemies of the Western establishment, were treated favorably by USSR news sources. Soon there were long-haired, jeans-wearing, Beatles-adoring Soviet youth, openly criticizing the Soviet establishment.

The KGB studied the emergent movement, ultimately concluding that hippies were useless idiots. Soviet police harassed and arrested hippies, sometimes giving them haircuts.

USSR hippiedom survived disco and Perestroika but not the dissolution of the Soviet state. Amanda Dee's Autumn of my Mind (below) is a rare Soviet hippie painting. It's dated 1989, a generation after Haigh-Ashbury's Diggers staged a somewhat premature burial for the hippie movement.

The Wende has assembled a substantial archive of Soviet hippie culture and has tapped other collections for loans. Two mannequins mix and match the dress of women and men flower-kids. The iconic Soviet-hippie freak flag is lost but has been recreated for the exhibition from a photograph.

For Soviet free spirits, the road trip was more important than the Woodstock. The Wende's garden is now marked with signs to Soviet hippie summer camps and safe spaces.