ABSTRACT
Moscow was the capital of a country that is itself enormous. This chapter focuses on the phenomenon of counterculture among Soviet youth with two places in Moscow's center that are only a mile apart and situated right within the heart of official power. The first, Maiakovskii Square, affectionately known as the Maiak, is home to an eponymous metro station and a monument to the Russian revolutionary writer, which from its inauguration became a magnet for Moscow's young literati and critically minded youth. The second is the Psichodrom, nickname for a courtyard of Moscow State University on what is called Okhotnyi Riad. The Maiak and the Psichodrom stand for two different groups of countercultural youth. Maiak rose to prominence when the city installed a statue of Vladimir Maiakovskii in 1958, which was commemorated by the Moscow Komsomol with an open-air poetry reading.
