Dropping out of socialism: the creation of alternative spheres in the soviet bloc

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Acknowledgments -- Introduction: to drop or not to drop? / Juliane Fürst -- Dropping out in spirit -- The biography of a scandal : experimenting with yoga during Romanian late socialism / Irina Costache -- The imaginary elsewhere of the hippies in soviet Estonia / Terje Toomistu -- Art and "madness" : weapons of the marginal during socialism in Eastern Europe / Maria-Alina Asavei -- Student activists and Yugoslavia's Islamic revival : Sarajevo, 1970-1975 / Madigan Andrea Fichter -- Intellectual dropping out -- Reader questionnaires in Samizdat journals : who owns Aleksandr Blok? / Josephine von Zitzewitz -- The spirit of pacifism : social and cultural origins of the grassroots peace movement in the late soviet period / Irina Gordeeva -- Dropping out of socialism with the commodore 64 : Polish youth, home computers, and social identities / Patryk Wasiak -- Dropping out in style -- "We all live in a yellow submarine" : dropping out in a Leningrad commune / Juliane Fürst -- Ignoring dictatorship? : punk rock, subculture, and entanglement in the GDR / Jeff Hayton -- "Under any form of government, I am partisan" : the Siberian underground from anti-soviet to national-bolshevist provocation / Ewgeniy Kasakow -- Dropping out economics -- Living in the material world : money in the soviet rock underground / Anna Kan -- Socialism's empty promise : housing vacancy and squatting in the German Democratic Republic / Peter Angus Mitchell -- Conclusion: dropping out of socialism? : a Western perspective / Joachim Häberlen -- Bibliography -- About the contributors.;The essays in this collection make up the first study of "dropping out" of late state socialism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. From Leningrad intellectuals and Berlin squatters to Bosnian Muslim madrassa students and Romanian yogis, groups and individuals across the Eastern Bloc rejected mainstream socialist culture. In the process, multiple drop-out cultures were created, with their own spaces, music, values, style, slang, ideology and networks. Under socialism, this phenomenon was little-known outside the socialist sphere. Only very recently has it been possible to reconstruct it through archival work, oral histories and memoirs. Such a diverse set of subcultures demands a multi-disciplinary approach: the essays in this volume are written by historians, anthropologists and scholars of literature, cultural and gender studies. The history of these movements not only shows us a side of state socialist life that was barely known in the west. It also sheds new light on the demise and eventual collapse of late socialism, and raises important questions about the similarities and differences between Eastern and Western subcultures. --