The countercultures of the former socialist societies have barely lost their glamour for researchers of central and eastern Europe and Russia over the nearly three decades that elapsed since the demise of the Soviet Bloc. As part of the sub-field of transitology, early accounts interrogated the contribution of subcultures to delegitimizing the system along with attempts to re-theorize western notions of resistance so as to render them applicable to the unique societal conditions of state socialism. The paradigm of resistance, however, has recently been problematized for not capturing the various shades and hues of alternativity as well as the intricacies of the cultural dynamics between east and west. (For the latest example, see Ewa Mazierska, ed., Popular Music in Eastern Europe: Breaking the Cold War Paradigm, 2016.) The editors Juliane Fürst and Josie McLellan's collection falls into this trend of complicating (mostly) subculture-based resistance and conventional understandings of east-west relations by looking at an impressive range of practices and ways of living—of squatters, literary samizdat producers, peaceniks, communards, yogis, “mad” artists, punks, hippies, Islamic student activists, and computer techies.
To what extent has the concept of dropping out enabled the authors to critique resistance performed by subcultures? In her Introduction, Fürst explains that “unlike subculture, [dropping out] does not require a collective … it can also be a very solitary action … ‘dropping out’ thus emphasizes the moment an individual leaves the mainstream orbit” (6). The solitary nature of this move is most dramatically and compellingly narrated in Maria Alina Asavei's three case studies of visual artists (of three different countries), who, unwilling to conform to the aesthetic dictates of Socialist Realism, invoked mental illness to symbolize their radical alienation. Likewise, Irina Gordeeva's valuable work on Soviet peace activists and Fürst's beautiful account of a hippie commune in Leningrad, while both addressing group life, include vividly-individuated portraits of key participants’ diverse, often clashing, intellectual and political perspectives; their dilemmas and desires; the risks they took and the repercussions they suffered for their acts.
“Dropping out” shifts the emphasis from the metaphorical and, at times, literal noise of rebellion to the process of social actors seeking deeper truths and meanings in life constrained by narrow definitions of normalcy in these societies. Besides “authenticity,” a concept shunned by cultural theory and reintroduced by Joachim C. Häberlen in his concluding essay, notions like the German Eigensinn (self-will) and the Russian istina (truth) are invoked to address the commonality of this varied group of nonconformists. “Most people describe dropping out as a rather quiet process,” Fürst contends, “which they discover only at the moment when it is a fait accompli” (6). Irina Costache's thoughtful account of yoga and transcendental meditation, initially embraced but subsequently persecuted by the Romanian party state, is a case in point, which brings to mind the similar trajectory of Falun Gong, the religious sect in communist China. Spiritualism, even more than institutional religion, has been treated as a serious threat to the status quo by state socialist regimes, as underscored by Terje Toomistu's discussion of Estonian counterculturalists.
In some case studies, the most attention-grabbing questions are related to the trajectory of actors following the fall of the communist regime. Jeff Hayton, for example, details the multiple tactics used by the Stasi to squash punks in East Germany, yet he seems more interested in how a “pure” and romanticized version of the movement's history has shaped up in the reunified Germany. This aspect of the story, however, points beyond the temporal and conceptual scope of the volume. Similarly, Evgeny Kazakov's thoroughly researched essay on the cultural politics of the Siberian punk underground raises broader and timely issues as to how and why the originally anti-Soviet ideological and aesthetic radicalism of a musical scene gave way, at least among its key figures, to anti-western nationalism in post-Soviet Russia. Even though the right-wing turn of individual punk rockers is not unique to the Russian context, the difference between East German and Siberian punks’ postsocialist trajectories provokes the question, especially in our era of proliferating populist movements, what peculiar sociopolitical contexts encourage radical nonconformists to side with authoritarian rather than progressive forces in turbulent times? Is this kind of entrenched rebelliousness indeed blind to the nature of the political system it fights, as Kazakov suggests?
The east-west binary was, evidently, a crucial aspect of nonconformists’ struggle. Aside from the samizdat writers of Leningrad defying the official canon of Russian literature (Josephine von Zitzewitz); the “mad” artists ignoring canons in their own field, or the student activists of the Islam revival in Sarajevo (Madigan Andrea Fichter), all other actors’ deviance scrutinized by this book's authors involved re-appropriations of western “imports”: cultural, intellectual, economic (Anna Kan, Peter Angus Mitchell), or technological (Patryk Wasiak). The relativization of the east-west divide, without obliterating the differences between alternative practices on two sides of the Iron Curtain, is a welcome feature of this book, in part reflecting the inspiration and influence of Alexei Yurchak's seminal work on late socialist (late Soviet) subjectivity and culture. Yet at times it seems the “discovery” of the similar-but-unique aspect of the eastern versions of nonconformity happens at the expense of ignoring important earlier work, including that of György Péteri and his excellent metaphor of the “nylon curtain” to suggest how western flows of ideas and commodities could reach easterners with relative ease, and how the “West” was perceived in the fun house mirrors of state-socialist societies (György Péteri, ed., Imagining the West in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, 2010.) My other criticism concerns the editors’ heavy focus on two countries: six of the twelve essays cover the Soviet Union and two are dedicated to East Germany. Countries with more liberal cultural and/or economic policies are underrepresented. Their proportionate inclusion may have resulted in a more balanced representation of the phenomenon of dropping out and deviance in the region. Despite these flaws, there remains much to learn from and appreciate about the theoretical, historiographic, and ethnographic contributions of this book to the study of the former Soviet Bloc.
