Cultural resistance of youth in Soviet period: traits of hippies’ subculture in Lithuania

The author presents a cultural movement of youth in 1960s against the Soviet ideologization. The present study is an anthropological analysis of Kaunas group of youth named Company, whose members identified themselves with hippies. The main method of investigation is a semi-structured interview of the members of the Company group. The oral history, biographical method, analysis of group documents and data from different articles in the press of the Soviet period were employed. The “snow ball” method was applied for the selection of respondents. The author discusses this cultural phenomenon in the context of the Western youth vanguard culture that influenced the spread of rock music, hippies’ ideas of freedom and youth fashion in Lithuania. Another context is the social environment of the Soviet Lithuanian Republic, where those ideas were interpreted. The concept of cultural resistance is revealed via the examples of various cultural activities of the group. First of all, the author discusses some biographical details of the members of Company as well as the environment of the old town of Kaunas, where the people from the investigated group lived and acted in 1960s. Their intercourse with families and school is discussed. Furthermore, their ideas of fashion and self-expression are presented. The author shows the process of how Company was formed and how it was influenced by the artists of the pantomime theatre. Music, poetry and a new mode of communication contributed to the creation of an alternative world of the subculture of Company. The author analyses how Lithuanian youth reflected Western modes of hippies’ culture. Their lifestyle encompasses such phenomena as living in communes, having rap sessions and the “rites o f intensification’ (a term used by W. L. Partridge, 1973) as well as the hippies’ journeys. All of these phenomena took place in a specific cultural context of the soviet ideology. The author presents the structure of Company and the process of how it split into a number of individual subgroups. Those smaller groups had their own values and perception of hippies’ culture. This phenomenon illustrates heterogeneousity of the cultural underground of 1960s. To conclude, the research suggests that the subculture of hippies is one of the first signs of the liberalization of Lithuanian youth culture