The word "high" comes from the Arabic "KEF", which means "time pleasant idleness" Bashny.Net

In Russia, the word "high" stuck at the beginning of the XIX century also to refer to any type of passive leisure - time for smoking tobacco, a cup of coffee or glass of wine could indulge in dreams and reveries. Fyodor Dostoevsky used this concept as a state of blissful pampering.

After the October Revolution, the use of the word, like many others related to the manifestation of bourgeois ideology, has come to naught, and was listed in dictionaries as obsolete.

Second birth "high" obliged Moscow World Festival of Youth and Students in 1957. At this time, it has become fashionable "to screw" in speaking words of foreign origin. The word "high" similar to the British, quickly became popular on a par with the words "Jeans" and "rock and roll" and was used in the same sense as before.

via factroom.ru