ABSTRACT
As any visitor to Moscow knows, the city is vast. Millions of people travel every day on thousands of kilometers of subway lines, while multistory housing blocks stretch for miles in every direction. And Moscow was, and still is, the capital of a country that is itself enormous. It might hence seem curious to start a chapter on the phenomenon of counterculture among Soviet youth with two places in Moscow’s center that are only a mile apart and situated right within the heart of official power. The first, Maiakovskii Square, affectionately known as the Maiak, is home to an eponymous metro station and a monument to the Russian revolutionary writer, which from its inauguration became a magnet for Moscow’s young literati and critically minded youth. The second is the Psichodrom, nickname for a courtyard of Moscow State University (Moskovskii Gosudarstvennyi Universitet, or MGU) on what is today called Okhotnyi Riad, located right opposite the Kremlin and only a few steps from the Lenin Library, Manezhnaia Square, and the monument to the unknown soldier in the Alexander Gardens. By virtue of its location next to most of MGU’s humanity faculties, it was a much-loved space of the city’s student population. In between the Maiak and the Psichodrom, a Soviet-era pedestrian would walk along Moscow’s main artery, Gorky Street (today Tverskaia Street), passing the imposing Mossoviet building, the capital’s city hall; the Institute of Marxism-Leninism just opposite Mossoviet; the showcase shops Elisevskii and Russian Wine; the Central Telegraph Building; and the Hotel Natsional, preferred abode of Moscow’s foreign guests. Everything that mattered to the Soviet system was located within a radius of about two miles from the Kremlin. It is both understandable and yet perplexing that this was the place where Soviet counterculture bloomed. It was here that youth invented and reinvented itself in opposition to and in imitation of official culture. It was in the heart of Soviet power that the Soviet variety of the global sixties was born.
