Soviet Christmas, Russian Dreams
Petr Chaikovskii’s “Nutcracker,” first performed in St. Petersburg in December, 1892, was set on Christmas Eve. In trying to destroy religion, the Soviets even changed the children’s party and Clara’s dream of dancing toys and nutcracker soldiers from Christmas Eve to New Year’s Eve.
A “New Year’s tree” was put up in the Hall of Columns at the House of Trade Unions near the Moscow Kremlin in 1917, shortly after the Bol'shevik Revolution. The tree became a new tradition. Lenin had several strokes beginning in 1922. On 7 January 1924, two weeks before he died, he attended a combined Christmas and New Year’s party, and invited all the children in the sanatorium where he was staying. His OGPU (secret police) guards decorated the 16-foot tree.
Even after the triumph of the Revolution and campaigns against religion, the Bol’shevik Lev Kamenev always celebrated Christmas with a tree and presents in his spacious apartment. So did other Soviet leaders and their children. Christmas (New Year’s) trees finally were identified as religious symbols and banned altogether in 1928. A tree returned to the Hall of Columns in 1935, and it became part of every New Year’s from 1937 on.
The largest Soviet anti-religious procession was staged in Moscow on Christmas Eve Day, 6 January 1923. (Orthodox Christmas is celebrated 13 days after Christmas in the West.) Students, working-class youth, Communist Youth League members, and representatives from other Soviet organizations paraded from noon until dark. Horsemen carried banners with anti-religious slogans. Trucks hauled clowns mocking religious practices and traditions, and students danced and sang around a bonfire. They burned effigies of all gods.
Sixteen black agricultural experts arrived in the Soviet Union in 1931. Many were highly educated, but could not find work in the United States. They were sent to a plant-breeding station near Yangiiul’, Uzbekistan to raise cotton. The black writer Langston Hughes visited them around Christmas, 1932. He wrote in I Wonder As I Wander that there were no fireplaces, gas stoves, radios, jukeboxes, or movies within driving distance. Only a few of the Americans had learned to speak Uzbek or Russian, so they were pretty much dependent on themselves.
Hughes said this did not much matter. They were not a gloomy group; in fact, they were quite amiable hosts, “these cotton-collective Negroes from America in the middle of a mud-cake oasis frosted with snow.” Hughes stayed in one of their houses the whole holiday. When he looked out the windows on Christmas morning he saw tall brown Uzbeks padding around the stables in the snow, just like in the pictures on his Sunday-school cards in Kansas when he was a child. In their robes, the Uzbeks looked exactly like characters from the Bible, “and I imagined in their stable a Manger and a Child.”
Tsar Ivan IV, known as Ivan the Terrible, built St. Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square to commemorate his victory over the Kazan’ Khanate in 1552. It consists of eight chapels, each crowned with a gloriously colored dome, surrounding a larger tower church with a tent roof. It was built between 1555 and 1561 and quickly became the most recognizable feature on Red Square. Ivan’s father Basil (Vasilii in Russian) had unified the Russian lands. He was canonized in 1588 as “Basil the
Blessed” and called a “Fool for Christ,” one who lives apart from this world, in dreams. He was buried under the Pokrovskii Cathedral, as the structure was first called. It was subsequently re-named the Kazan’ Cathedral, but eventually it became known by its popular name, St. Basil’s. There seems to have been no model for the cathedral. It arose from the imagination of two architects — a riot of color, a polychrome dream. Ivan the Terrible put out their eyes to ensure that they would never create anything as beautiful.
Stalin planned to raze the cathedral in the 1930s. He wanted Red Square open for parades. He already had destroyed the most revered shrine in Russia, the Chapel of the Iberian Virgin, at the other end of Red Square, dynamiting it at night in 1929. St. Basil's was saved by a Russian architect who wrote the Soviet leader, pleading, arguing that he spare this famous Russian church. The architect was sent to a labor camp, but St. Basil’s survived.
In January, 1991, for the first time in 71 years, a public Orthodox Christmas ceremony was held in Red Square. A Christmas tree was lighted and the bells of St. Basil’s were rung. The Soviet Navy Band played “Jingle Bells,” “Oh Come All Ye Faithful,” and “Stars and Stripes Forever.”
Stalin understood the meaning of Christmas. His 70th birthday was celebrated on 21 December 1949, even though he had been born on 9 December. He could have chosen either date with the calendar change; most Russians probably would have selected the day on which they actually had been born. Nina Turnarkin has noted that this contrived observance near the Christmas season “turned Stalin’s gleaming face into a Soviet star on Bethlehem.” The Italian Communist Party presented him with a chrome-plated racing bicycle.
In his novel Dr. Zhivago, Boris Pasternak described his protagonist Yurii Zhivago turning out of one lane into another. He “had already lost count of how many turns he had taken when suddenly the snow began swirling down, whipping itself into a blizzard, a kind of blizzard which, in an open field, swishes across the land with a scream.” This dizzying, dreamlike blizzard which caught up Zhivago was the Bol’shevik Revolution. At first, he had accepted it with enthusiasm; then, like Pasternak himself, he gradually became disillusioned with it.
The novel was published in Italy, not in the Soviet Union, in 1957, and Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1958. He first accepted it, then had to reject it. Zhivago’s loss of faith in Bol’shevism had offended the authorities, and Pasternak was denounced in the USSR. He said in a poem written just before Christmas that he felt like "a hunted beast.”
When another Russian, the émigré writer Vladimir Nabokov, reached for snow, his thoughts turned melancholy: “The snow is real, though, and as I bend to it and scoop up a handful, sixty years crumble to glittering frost-dust between my fingers.”
For many years, Ded Moroz (Father Frost) and Snegurochka (Princess Snowflake) have substituted for Santa Claus for Soviet children. New Year’s has substituted for Christmas. This year they have their Christmas. They do not expect much. They need a miracle. This will be a Christmas of Russian dreams.