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The Transformations Of The Rebellion

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Lietuviškai

The Rebellion of Youth (1964–1991)

On the Road

This was the great miracle of the System – hitchhiking. When you go out, stop a car and drive off. […] the most important thing is that you feel like you’ve taken off something dirty, something so filthy, because you’re going out on the road, free. It was crazy, but it was so good. […] That road, it… first and foremost gave you a sense of liberation – a very big and deep one. Of belonging to no one. You truly belonged to yourself, and no one else – not a party, not an organisation, not your father, not your mother, not your grandmother, not your grandfather, no one. You just were, simple as that.

Poet Romualdas Trachimas-Tomas Mučius

Hitchhiking didn’t always mean stopping cars on the road – it could also be on a passenger train, usually without a ticket, or in the freight wagons. There were times when you had to travel with a hook attached to it, or when you would go on foot – after all, you can’t just stand there. The Lithuanian translation of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road came out in Lithuania in 1972 and was the first piece to be published by this Beatnik writer in the entire Soviet Union. The book became the freethinkers’ Bible. Feeling like Kerouac’s heroes, young people would go out and hit the road, where every second could take them in a new direction – away from home, from their parents and from the corruption of the system that had become embedded in the homeland. The same system still existed in the USSR, but while out hitchhiking, a person could become detached from its rules and constraints for a while, leaving them on the road with the buildings, poles and trees disappearing in the distance.

Arvydas Makauskas-Makys (centre) hitchhiking with friends on the Vilnius–Ukmergė highway.

Occupied Lithuania, 1981. Photo by Rita Makauskienė (personal archive of Arvydas Makauskas)

Hippies used to leave notes for their parents: “Don’t worry, don’t look for me – I left.” Sometimes people wouldn’t go far and would stay in Lithuania, but sometimes they would hitchhike thousands of kilometres for months on end to the remotest corners of the “largest country in the world”, which could be admired, but few became attached, preferring to come and go as they pleased. People would travel to hippie gatherings and rock festivals, and stay in Russian hippie communes, in the flats of Leningrad and Moscow bohemians, cultural aristocrats and dissidents, or in Orthodox and Buddhist monasteries. This is how the Rebellion was expressed. Freedom was floating in the wind like a spider’s web… Hitchhiking became a trance. The road forward to the horizon, the road up to faith, the road down to alcohol and drugs, the road to yourself and away from yourself… For some it was just an adventure, but for others it was interacting with people and discovered or visited aristocrats of the spirit, the magnificence of human and natural creations, which became a priceless experience, knowledge, wisdom and confidence, turned into the highest science. “[…] the gang came up with the idea that they had to go to Altai, where there’s Belukha Mountain and the Gate to Shambhala – that they had to meditate there. […] They go and come back full of impressions. ‘[…] We didn’t reach Belukha itself, the trees started to fall there, apparently they considered us spiritually unfit, but we spent some time in those glaciers’”, remembers Vytautas Inokaitis, an amateur entomologist, musician, expeditioner.

Students.

Alytus, late 1960s. Photo author unknown (personal archive of Gintaras Kušlys)

Arkadijus was a member of Company, the Kaunas hippie group. He went out on the road with all his belongings, flagged down a Zhiguli, and hitched a ride to Moscow to see the Mona Lisa, which was there on display. “Inside there was a guy maybe 30 years old, wearing sunglasses and a non-Soviet T-shirt. Along the way, he asked if I was a hippie. I said yes. He said he had seen a lot of them in Piccadilly Square in London.” During the journey, Arkadijus read his poems. After some time, the news reached him that he had got into the car of the Russian writer Vasily Aksyonov. The adventure of the young hippie who hitched a ride turned into a story by a dissident novelist.

Hippie Jurijus Tolčkovas-Guliveris, a close friend of rebellious artist Gitenis Umbrasas, riding in a freight train car across the vast landscapes of Central Asia. He later died in the mountains of the Mamison Pass in Ossetia (now part of the Republic of North Ossetia–Alania in the Russian Federation and the Russian-occupied territory of South Ossetia).

RSFSR, early 1980s. Photo author unknown (personal archive of Gitenis Umbrasas)

Artist Gitenis Umbrasas (first on the right) and his friends setting up a campsite at the Mamison Pass near the symbolic border between the Russian SFSR and the Georgian SSR (now the Republic of North Ossetia–Alania in the Russian Federation and Russian-occupied South Ossetia).

USSR, early 1980s. Photo author unknown (personal archive of Gitenis Umbrasas)

Artist Gitenis Umbrasas (first on the right) and his friends setting up a campsite at the Mamison Pass near the symbolic border between the Russian SFSR and the Georgian SSR (now the Republic of North Ossetia–Alania in the Russian Federation and Russian-occupied South Ossetia).

USSR, early 1980s. Photo author unknown (personal archive of Gitenis Umbrasas)

Artist Gitenis Umbrasas painting the Caucasus Mountains at the Mamison Pass near the symbolic border between the Russian SFSR and the Georgian SSR (now the Republic of North Ossetia–Alania in the Russian Federation and South Ossetia, occupied by the Russian Federation). Further away – Gitenis’s yoga-practicing friends from Moscow.

USSR, early 1980s. Photo author unknown (personal archive of Gitenis Umbrasas)

Hippie youth at the Mamison Pass in the Caucasus Mountains near the border between the Russian SFSR and the Georgian SSR (now the Republic of North Ossetia–Alania in the Russian Federation and South Ossetia, occupied by the Russian Federation).

USSR, early 1980s. Photo author unknown (personal archive of Gitenis Umbrasas)