See the original text of this letter in Ukrainian in Raisa Lysha, Yurii Vivtash, and Orysia Sokulska, eds., Porohy: Vybrane, vol. 1–9 (Kyiv: Smoloskyp, 2009), 432–38. In August of 1968, this letter was sent to the Head of the Council of Ministers of the UkrSSR V. V. Shcherbytskyi, the Candidate Member of the Politburo of the Central Party Committee F. D. Ovcharenko, and the Secretary of the Writers’ Union D. V. Pavlychko.
30 See the English translation of this letter in The Ukrainian Review XVI, no. 3 (1969): 46–52. This text entitled “Letter from the Creative Youth of Dnipropetrovsk” was published without the author’s name. As a result of international publicity of this case, the first scholarly analysis of these events appeared in English in Kenneth C. Farmer, Ukrainian Nationalism in the Post-Stalin Era: Myth, Symbols and Ideology in Soviet Nationalities Policy (The Hague, Boston, London: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1980), 158–59. Compare with Ludmilla Alexeyeva, Soviet Dissent: Contemporary Movements for National, Religious, and Human Rights, trans. Carol Pearce and John Glad (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1985), 40. See also HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 977, ark. 367–71.
31 For more details, see Zhuk, Rock and Roll, 48–64.
32 As early as 1996, KGB documents on Soviet hippies were quoted in a book by a prominent Soviet dissident. See Bukovsky, Judgment in Moscow, 136.
33 HDA SBU, f. 16, op.1, spr. 974, ark. 114–15.
34 Ibid. See also Amerika, no. 150, April 1969, pp. 12–18. Amerika was a monthly periodical published in Russian by the U.S. Information Agency, beginning from 1959. KGB analysts discussed a shorter version of Keniston’s article published in Amerika in Russian translation. For a full version, see Kenneth Keniston, “Youth, Change and Violence,” The American Scholar 37, no. 2 (1968): 227–45. The KGB was concerned about the Soviet hippies who, like their American counterparts, might use political violence and create alternative political structures that would disrupt the political status quo. According to Keniston’s interpretation, that is what American hippies tried to accomplish. Those Soviet hippies planned to participate “in the all-Union congress during this summer (1969) either in Riga, or Tallinn.” Even recent graduates of high schools demonstrated a similar behavior in 1969 and 1970. Some of them organized a secret society in the city of Slaviansk (Donetsk oblast), known as “Koka-Kola,” “expressing their protest against the existing political order.” See HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1009, ark. 167–68. Among numerous studies on hippies as part of American counterculture, the best historical analysis was offered by Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle in their “Introduction: Historicizing the American Counterculture of the 1960s and ’70s” to Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s and ’70s, ed. Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle (New York: Routledge, 2002), 5–14.
35 HDA SBU, f. 16, op.1, spr. 1011, ark. 81–92 (with a hand-written note by a party secretary “Report personally on the measures” on ark. 81). See a copy of the same report in HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1009, ark. 317–28.
36 On those groups, see Zhuk, Rock and Roll, 79–92, 97–105.
37 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1011, ark. 81.
38 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1011, ark. 82.
39 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1011, ark. 85.
40 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1011, ark. 84. “In April 1970, more than 100 hippies from different cities of the USSR, including Lviv, met in Vilnius, where they had a non-official festival of acoustic music (without electric instruments).”
41 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1011, ark. 85–86. The third part of Gorky’s Old Izergil entitled “The Flaming Heart of Danko” was an obligatory reading in Russian literature classes in Soviet high schools. Writing the report, a KGB officer, by mistake, presented the British rock band “The Animals” as American. (“Amerikanskii modernistskii ansambl ‘Zhivotnyie’” in the original, ark. 86).
42 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1011, ark. 87–88; f. 16, op. 1, spr. 993, ark. 358–61; f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1015, ark. 325.
43 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1011, ark. 88–89.
44 On Pokalchuk, see HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1095, ark. 182–85; for more on the hippies’ engagement with the Orthodox Church in Kupiansk, see HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1089, ark. 321; for a report about the substantial growth of Krishnaites in Ukraine, see HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1175, ark. 132–34, and f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1184, ark. 36–37. See also DADO, f. 19, op. 60, spr. 85, ark. 7, 17, and Zhuk, Rock and Roll, 200, 201, 205. Some police officers reported that the hippies had publicly displayed various religious symbols, such as Christian crosses and icons, as well as portraits of Krishna and Buddha.
45 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1162, ark. 126.
46 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1162, ark. 128.
47 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1249, ark. 147.
48 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1011, ark. 90. KGB officers, who studied local hippies, distanced themselves from the “ideological nonsense” of Komsomol periodicals, which wrote that the “American hippies were a satanic sect embracing a mixture of palmistry, astrology, and black magic, and that the hippies were looking for a virgin girl for their devilish black mass ritual and could not find such girls among themselves.” See the author’s interview with Stepan Ivanovich T., a retired KGB officer, 30 January 2019, Kyiv, Ukraine. He referred to Mykola Solomatin, “Zhertvy chornoi magii,” Ranok, no. 1, January 1974, pp. 18–19.
49 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1015, ark. 324–25.
50 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1015, ark. 323.
51 Zhuk, Rock and Roll, 102, 103, 170–71, 267–79.
52 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1200, ark. 68; the author’s interview with Stepan Ivanovich T., a retired KGB officer, 30 January 2019, Kyiv, Ukraine.
53 HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 1, spr. 1200, ark. 68.
