‘Flowers From Soil Of Sick Society’

Press, Volume CVII, Issue 31530, 18 November 1967, Page 13

‘Flowers From Soil Of Sick Society’

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter—Copyright) MOSCOW, November 17. A Soviet writer who recently visited the heart of London’s hippieland has defended the flower children’s movement against charges that it is made up of idlers from “the scum of the capitalist world.”

But Alexander Chakovsky, a senior Kremlin literary official, proclaimed himself unimpressed by the hippy philosophy and described its followers as “flowers grown on the soil of a sick society.” Mr Chakovsky devoted an entire page of the weekly literary gazette, which he edits, to a detailed analysis of the hippy movement, the first serious study in depth it has received in Russia. On a recent trip to Britain, Mr Chakovsky visited two hippy clubs, a hippy shop, and talked with ordinary hippies. In one club he was particularly intrigued by the dance floor. “About 30 to 40 young

people of both sexes were performing strange convulsive movements, by comparison with which the good old rock and roll or the hottest shake would have looked like a waltz in a pre-revolutionary college for young society ladies.

“It was not even a dance, or even anything remotely approaching one,” Mr Chakovsky wrote.

But he rejected any simple condemnation of the flower children as “bohemians, idlers and the scum of capitalist society” in spite of the hippies’ own professed antipathy to communism. Their beliefs, he said, “are a naive, silly and whimsical mixture of liberalism, desire to shock, omnivorousness and eroticism—as funny and as poverty-stricken as the flower children’s clothes.”

Mr Chakovsky warned against mocking the movement. For, he said, the flower children are victims of the society in which they live—‘They are an illustration of alienation—the mark of Cain of the class society.”