It is hard to imagine a more exotic phenomenon in the everyday life of the late USSR than the hippie movement. Nevertheless, by the end of the Khrushchev Thaw, a large group of people emerged who understood freedom, love, and equality quite differently from the official ideologists.

The memoirs of Vitaly Zyuzin, an artist and participant in street exhibitions, begin in 1983 and sequentially recount his immersion into this environment. The author describes meetings with iconic Soviet hippies, visits to their summer camps in the Baltics and the Caucasus, conflicts with the police, and encounters with jazz musicians.

This authentic account, which challenges many stereotypical notions, offers readers a chance to look inside a community that managed to create its own parallel world within Soviet reality.