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William Jay Risch wrote Soviet ‘Flower Children’. Hippies and the Youth Counter-Culture in 1970s L’viv which was about the role these hippies played in the global counterculture. These hippies in Russia experienced alienation from the modern world. The hippies that lived in L'viv faced the Communist Party trying to control the public sphere, tensions in the Ukraine, and processes of urbanization and industrialization in the Soviet Union. I think the Russians tried to control the way people thought so that new ways of thinking and a change in the culture and societal norms wouldn’t call for reforms within the government.
The article is about how the Russians were trying to control the hippies’ thoughts and propaganda from spreading. The hippies were doing nothing wrong but wanting to reform the government peacefully. It seems like the Russian government was afraid of a hippie revolution. It also appears to me that the Russian government didn’t like the influence of the United States and England within their borders with the hippies listening to rock music from bands such as the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix.
I would characterize this article as a descriptive article. It’s not really implying anything or trying to be philosophical in any way. All the article is doing is describing what the hippies were doing for the advancement of their beliefs. The hippies were nonviolent individuals who just wanted to spread peace and love and revoke the old culture norms.
The hippies were trying to get the government to change through protests. The Russian government saw these hippies as drug users, lazy, and bums, who engaged in frivolous activities, looked hideous, were lost, mentally disturbed or associated with criminals. They were not produc...

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...gin with and what those hippies were struggling with.
My overall assessment is that I really enjoyed reading about the hippies of the Ukraine. I feel like I know a little more on how rough of a country it is out there. I feel as though these people didn’t have freedom in their own country to live the way they wanted to. I definitely wouldn’t want to live in a country that’s so strict on everything from your beliefs to whether or not you can have a beard and listen to rock music. It seems it was a rough life to be a hippie during this time. I don’t blame them for trying to change how the government is run and cause friction about it. The hippies did it in a nonviolent fashion and it seems they were a new generation of thinking and the Russians could only put their foot down because they didn’t know how to deal with the pressure of someone fighting their traditions.

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