As among the Parisian comrades of the May revolution, no serious revolutionaries were discovered among the “hippies”. Timothy Leary, “the prophet of LSD” with his ideology of drugs, obviously looked more serious. Ken Kesey with the novel “One flew over the cuckoo's nest”, published in 1961 later experimented with drugs and life in communes – did not came out as a leader. Manson sullied the “hippie” movement in criminality.
The 70s, especially their fist half, belonged to the young rather by momentum. In 1975 in London on Kings the punks movement was born (a young hooligan, on the slang of the 40s). However though red haired like Kohn-Bendit, Malcom Mcloren was able to create a style and created the style of a “young hooligan”, the punks limited themselves to the style as an ideology just adding spontaneous anarchy to it. The revolutionaries of the 60s who wanted to continue their struggle in the 70s principally went into radial politics and this road led them, the German boys into the RAF, the Italian to “the Red Brigades”. As for the French, the radically toughest turned out to be Paul Goldman (the brother of the singer Jean-Jacques Goldman) – a bald sturdy fellow. He was shot during the expropriation of a bank in 1973. The same year was banned the organization of the “autonomists”, these guys in masks participated in all demonstrations of any kind and transformed them into combats with the police.
In November 1974 I saw young Italy with its red flags. I was 31 years old but externally – long hair, in rumpled jeans, I looked 20 something and perfectly matched with these 70s and that country. Italy was boiling, demonstrations were taking place every day, the smell of tear gas floated over Rome. I remember I entered Rome University where I had an appointment with the late professor Angello Maria Ripellino. While in the university there was a fight of students with the police. I liked it so much!
We left Rome on a PANAM flight to New York precisely the 18 February 1975, the day when Mara Cagol freed her husband, the leader of the “Red Brigades” Renato Curcio from jail. She got there with four other comrades: they all took out machine guns and the security got down on the floor. Our flight was delayed: they were looking for a bomb. All the passengers had to recognize their briefcases: they were put on the flight field. My briefcase with books turned out to be broken, naturally it was the heaviest one, where else than in the heaviest briefcase should one look for a bomb of the “Red Brigades”?
New York was naturally a city for serious middle age and old businessmen but there was the Lower East Side where the American Punk roamed and was born among the children of the eastern-European immigrants. Not many people got this, by after all I wrote “It's Me, Eddie” in 1976 and “Diary of a loser” in 1977 in New York, in essence inside the punk-movement, in the esthetic of a punk. Also there were personal contacts – I slept with Mereline Mazure, a girl-photographer, she studied in a visual arts school and was an avant-garde chick – she took pictures of pregnant women, led me to (at that time they were still illegal) S M clubs. In April 1977 I met Julie Carpenter and she was friends with Maryanne, the girlfriend of Markie from the band “Ramones” and he was also a musician for the punk-star Richard Hell (his most famous album – “Blank Generation”), so I lived in all of this. And the atmosphere influenced even more: the newspaper “Village Voice” – announcements about representations of punk bands in the CBGB, printed in white font on black background, they are still today standing before my eyes. Unemployed, I went to lectures of anarchists, to the CBGB, roamed the Lower East Side with girls with lilac hair, on St. Marks Place, attended meetings of the Socialist Workers Party. I was rebelling and looked for a gang of people like me. If America was more revolutionary I would have been revolutionary already then.
In 1977 Sid Vicious came to New York and lived in the Chelsea Hotel. He was shown on TV, hissing, wrinkling his nose, cursing. Himself extravagant, he was with Nancy, a really ordinary chick with acne. Their entire story could be observed time to time on television. I came to Chelsea Hotel, wanted to live there. They said to me that the waiting list is signed up years beforehand and laughed a bit at the emigrant who was badly speaking English. However they did not laugh a lot, what if this insolent weirdo will become the second Andy Warhol, Lower East Side was full of all kinds of visiting morons. In 1977 Nancy died from an OD, Vicious was arrested. Among the aristocratic bohemia and punk beau-monde the opinions diverged: some considered Sid a murderer, others – the All Mighty God of the punk-movement who could do anything he wanted. I felt that with Nancy’s death, Vicious entered the clan of heaven residents like Rimbaud or Lautreamont. That’s exactly what happened, in 1978 Vicious himself died from an OD. Some years earlier in Paris Morrison died, just as tragically messed up.
In actual fact this was the end. The Empire of Youth lasted from 1966, from the call of Mao “Bombard the Headquarters!” up until 1978 – until Vicious’s death. Only during that lapse of time young people were aware of themselves and the others as a class, with particular demands and needs. They were about to force their privileges on the world. But it did not happen.
It is symptomatic that another even earlier idol of youth, Elvis Presley promptly died in 1977, had the time to fit in the time limit. Only more and more sharp explosions and terrorist acts of the “Red Brigades” and the RAF members up until the middle of the 80s still reminded time to time about the hopes of the European youth to seize the power.
And what about modern Russia? First of all, I assert: all attempts as of the right reformists (SPS, “Yabloko”) and the left restorers of the USSR (Zuganov, Anpilov) to press down on the young people did not succeed. The virtual, “advanced”, “hype”, materially provided young people in bright pants, sweet to the hearts of Kirienko and Nemtsov do not yet exist: in our poor and very peasant-like country. And the rough, crooked, corny, blindly devoted to the Marxist dogmatism young people in pea jackets, overcoats, sheepskin coats do not exist anymore. Putin’s block “Unity” and Putin’s PRists try to build the young people: Surkov and Co, but the project is doomed to fail. Because they take young men and women not as equal partners but as servants: for the role of speechless helpers, guardians, lackeys and executioners of the will of functionaries. Even the pleasures of making photocopies or placing bottles with mineral water on “Unity’s” congresses are given to a few only. For a small price the students naturally will put on t-shirts with the logos of anyone you’ll want and will wave flags but it is piecework and not a political party.
The young people do not want it this way. They are not interested in serving the adults.
They want to do it themselves. They want to find a change to their life in a political party, to find their fate. A young person who is just starting life mostly likes the slogan: “Who was nothing will became everything!” Because coming to the awareness age of 14 and more, boys are dreaming only about it:
Magically, right away, with one leap to become “everything”. This is why they idolize epochs in which it was possible. Epochs of revolution, when sixteen years olds commanded over troops and twenty years olds over armies.
The epoch of the end of 80s, beginning of 90s at first appeared to be such an epoch to a part of our young people.
But it did not confirm their hopes. Gradually the democratic revolution was extinguished by the party apparatchiks who got scared by it. External enthusiasts, who noisily dethroned statues became useless and even dangerous. The bureaucratic power was being restored.