Forbidden Union: Hippies, Mystics, Dissidents

Frequently, religious searching in the Soviet counterculture merged with psychedelic issues. “I have finally and forever determined that God exists just after particularly strong weed,” Maria Remizova wrote.54The memoirs of Soviet hippie and occultist, Vladimir Wiedemann, focuses exclusively on the psychedelic combination of the religious and drug elements of the youth counterculture of the late-Soviet period.55Contemporaries and participants in the hippie movement themselves underlined that many adepts of the “new religious consciousness” were mainly social outsiders, drinkers, and drug-addicts.