Soviet Rock Collection and International Counterculture Archive at the Global Resources Center of the George Washington University Libraries

This memoir is my personal story about how I created and came to curate on the International Counterculture Archive collection, which is held in the Global Resources Center of the George Washington University’s (GWU) Gelman library. The first person narrative relates my first encounters with Soviet rock culture and describes how I turned my initial interest into a Ph.D. dissertation on the subculture of Soviet hippies and traditions of Soviet rock music, which subsequently led to my later work as a librarian and curator. I tell the story of my initial encounters with the members of Soviet/Russian rock music subculture and other countercultural personalities and activists during my first trip to Moscow in 1993 to collect samples of Soviet rock music recordings and rock music zines for the European Division of the Library of Congress. During this formative trip I met with a number of counterculture producers and collectors who were instrumental in helping me build the International Counterculture Archive. Upon leaving the Library of Congress, I continued collecting Soviet/Russian countercultural materials on behalf of the Global Resources Center of GWU’s Gelman Library. I talk about the process of creating the Archive at Gelman library, about bureaucratic and financial aspects of this work, and about my many acquisition trips to Moscow, former Soviet republics, and East Central Europe. Much of the narrative centers on my work with Russian collectors and content producers and describes the type of materials that are included in the collection. I also describe how I built the collection of historical Soviet/Russian rock music recordings, focusing on the phenomenon of Soviet/Russian rock music zines and the history of the unique zine collection within the International Counterculture Archive.