As Vladimir Putin announces his desire to make peace with Ukraine and we prepare to commemorate the sad anniversary of the Russian invasion on February 22, 2022, ZEWEED looks back at an astonishing sequence from the Soviet era: the Peace and Love in USSR movement. A beautiful invitation to make love and not war, which the current Kremlin tenant would have done well to take inspiration from three years ago.
It’s an era about which little is known, as foreigners’ visits to the USSR were carefully supervised by a system that maintained absolute control over its citizens.
Long before the October Revolution of 1917, the cultivation of hemp for industrial purposes was widespread throughout the country, making Russia the world’sleading hemp producer. This cultivation was already very old: Russia had been supplying hemp for British naval ropes since 1715, in the time of Tsar Peter the Great.
At the end of the 19th century, with competition from American cotton and burlap, hemp production declined rapidly. It wasn’t until the 1930s, under Stalin, that it picked up again, strongly encouraged by producer subsidies, medals and privileges (Stakhanovism at work).
At the beginning of the 20th century, the recreational use of cannabis was still essentially limited to the regions of Central Asia. Local populations had been smoking hashish for at least 6 centuries, and Russian settlers learned about it from them.
In 1934, the USSR penal code banned the unauthorized cultivation of cannabis and opium.
Indian hemp was definitively banned in 1960, while hemp production remained predominant.
Soviet Hippies
During this period of severe repression, however, a hippie movement developed, extensively documented in the excellent ” Soviet Hippies ” (2017) by Estonian director Terje Toomistu.
During the 60s and 70s, the very existence of hippies in the Soviet Union was constantly denied by official discourse and the media. In fact, for the vast majority of Russians living at the time, there were no hippies in the USSR.
The only artistic field where we could see a strong psychedelic influence was animated films (aimed at children), probably the only creative area where censorship did not intervene (or very little).
At the time, there was hardly any LSD to be found, but a lot of cannabis was in circulation, which attracted the attention of the KGB, more for the trafficking aspect than for the substance itself. It’s also said that during regular searches of hippies’ homes, KGB agents were more interested in forbidden books than in smoking weed.
Demonstration against the Vietnam War in Red Square
On June1, 1971, for thefirst time, thousands of hippies gathered in Moscow to protest against the Vietnam War. The KGB took advantage of the occasion to arrest 3,000 of them, who were immediately thrown into prison.
From then on, the hippie movement went underground, and participants created a network called “Sistema” (system), giving them access to weed and smuggled goods (books, records, jeans), and above all to travel and accommodation in other USSR cities when all movement was controlled by the authorities.
The survivors of this era still commemorate the June1 date in Moscow every year.
The history of the hippies in the USSR is still stigmatized, as demonstrated by the recent decision of the Vladivostok theater to cancel a reading of Mikhail Durnenkov’s play “How the Estonian Hippies Destroyed the Soviet Union”, on the eve of Vladimir Putin’s visit to the city on September 2.
Vladimir Putin had repeatedly expressed his regret at the collapse of the Soviet Union, calling it ” the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”.
Grass of the Magic Valley
In the Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan, the Chu valley has always been known as the source of the best weed, which the Russians called “dichka” (wild).
This herb was renowned throughout the country, so much so that the Chu valley became a place of pilgrimage for USSR hippies.
The Soviet authorities did everything they could to eradicate the crop, burning the fields and using all kinds of herbicides and pesticides, but nothing could stop the weed from growing back ever more vigorously.
Since the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, Chu dichka continues to be in great demand: it’s the “caviar of weed”.
Weed caviar from the Chu Valley: harvested bareback on a horse
The most popular harvesting method (and still used today) involves a person who has just had a shower, mounts a freshly washed horse and gallops for several hours through a forest of weed (with plants easily reaching 3m in height), until they are covered in a sticky layer of cannabis resin, which is then scraped and pressed into blocks.
There are certainly simpler and more discreet ways of harvesting the resin, but we must admit that this one has style.
In any case, it’s an original vacation destination for next summer, and as the harvest takes place in August, it gives us a bit of time for horse-riding.
