Subcultures and New Religious Movements in Russia and East-Central Europe (McKay, Christopher Williams, Michael Goddard, Neil Foxlee, Egidija Ramanauskaite, eds., Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009)

Ethnologists, sociologists, philosophers, linguists and other cultural academic specialists provide a passionate insight into the largely unknown and sometimes demonised world of subcultures and new religious movements that have proliferated in Russia and Central and Eastern Europe since the fall of the former Soviet empire…. The first part of the book focuses on the different subcultures which, although they are not an appendage of this part of the world,… are perceived as the product of ‘specifically local post-socialist history’, and in this connection are as different to each other as are the similar cultural movements in the west. This ‘globalization of subcultures in eastern Europe’, according to the formula developed by George McKay and Michael Goddard, is translated, for example, into the Russian skinhead movement of Kazan, the inheritors of the criminal gangs or their Lithuanian alter-egos, also motivated by nationalist ideology. Similarly,… the supporters of the hip-hop movement in Romania and Estonia display both in substance and in style, at least as many differences as points they have in common. [Other contributions in part one] focus on the 1960s counterculture movements, namely the Lithuania hippies, as well as the ‘Euro-Indians’ and an eco-village in Slovakia. Michel Theys, Bulletin Quotidien Europe, European Library no. 10159/874 (June 15 2010)