The Soviet Union had a fraught and contradictory relationship with the Christmas season and its associated mythology, a product of the longstanding tensions between the state’s militantly atheistic worldview and the deep cultural and religious imprint of Orthodox Christianity on Russian society. For the Bolsheviks, Christmas was derided as a bourgeois holiday, celebrating Western excess and Christian superstition. The holiday’s religious significance and heavily commercialized form together made it a potent symbol of bourgeois power in the revolutionary imagination. It is, then, unsurprising that the early Soviet state sought to banish a holiday representing values it vehemently opposed. In the wake of the revolution, the early Leninist era sought to invert the celebration into a kind of “anti-Christmas,” turning the holiday on its head and staging various educational festivities mocking religion. Yet by the 1930s, we see a resurgence of traditional holiday customs—now secularized—and recast as the New Year celebration. Many traditional Christmas customs were retained, either directly or with modifications, and incorporated into this newly sanctioned holiday, the focus of the follow up to this piece.
This time of year, I often see pop-history articles circulating online that describe the Communist “war on Christmas”—how the Soviets suppressed the season holidays and repressed Christians and priests—only to eventually capitulate to the indomitable spirit of the holidays and revive the celebrations (The FEE’s “How The Soviets Stole Christmas” or the Hungarian Conservative’s “How Stalin Stole Christmas” are emblematic examples). The Soviet state’s assault the Church, Christianity, and its practitioners are important parts of the story of Soviet Christmas, but the exclusive emphasis on repression neglects the broader context and historical backdrop to the anti-Christmas sentiment promoted by the Soviets.
In these pop-history accounts, the Communists are reduced to a Grinch-like caricature; Stalin, like Narnia’s White Witch, ushers in a dark, dreary world of “always winter, but never Christmas.” The representation of the Orthodox Church as purely a victim obscures how popular hostility toward the institutional Church predated Bolshevik rule and was rooted in its long-standing association with autocratic power and social inequality. The Church’s alignment with the increasingly unpopular imperial autocracy created an opening for the Bolshevik anti-clerical messaging to gain traction, and this resonated with certain sectors of the population. It should be noted that much of the urban working class supported Bolshevism and, by extension, its anti-religious ethos. The working class’ grievances against the Church “had real historical roots that could be traced to the silence of many clergy and educated laity in the face of the tsarist regime’s abuse of power and social injustice” (Shevzov 2020, 49). The Bolshevik crusade against the powerful pillar of the autocratic imperial state, including its customs and traditions, cannot be easily separated from abuses in which the Church was deeply complicit.
One historian describes how an Orthodox professor of philosophy, in an address to a meeting of clergy and laity in Kiev, conceded that there was a “responsibility that the clergy and Orthodox intelligentsia bore for widespread workers’ hostility towards the institutional Church” (Shevzov 2020, 49). The Church’s close collaboration with the autocracy had eroded its moral authority among many urban workers and created political space that allowed the Bolsheviks to frame the Church as a counter-revolutionary institution with interests that were fundamentally opposed to those of the toiling masses of Soviet society. Sablinsky writes that after Bloody Sunday, the 1905 massacre of peaceful protesters in St. Petersburg by imperial troops, even “the most religious monarchists among the workers tore portraits of the tsars from the walls of their homes. Some removed the icons also” (Sablinksy 1976, 274). That fervently religious workers removed religious icons from their homes in response to repression reveals that even the most revered elements of the faith could be rejected in the face of political outrage—the same impulse that the Bolsheviks later harnessed in their anti-Christmas messaging.
We must also consider the Orthodox Church’s associations with the ultra-nationalist Black Hundreds, a violent movement responsible for pogroms against Jews and other minorities. The movement relied on its close ties with local clergy to mobilize support and legitimize its agenda: Tsetsyk (2021) writes that the “Black Hundreds enjoyed the support of the imperial authorities, and in Volhynia at the origins of the organization stood the Orthodox clergy, who played a key role in forming the organizational network of the URP.” The URP (Union of the Russian People) was the largest and most prominent organisation within the broader Black Hundred movement, with as many as a shocking 10% of its members drawn from the clergy (Ivanov 2020, 289). Notably, prominent Orthodox figures such as St. John of Kronstadt and Patriarch Tikhon were associated with the Black Hundreds (Ivanov 2020, 288).
While there were disagreements within the Church regarding the ultranationalist group and many clergy indeed disapproved of the URP’s violence, the Church as an institution did not formally condemn the movement, effectively allowing it to operate with implicit religious legitimacy, spreading within its ranks. The URP presented itself as the vanguard protector of Orthodoxy and regarded the religion as the cornerstone of its ideology, creating a close association in the minds of the public between the movement and the Orthodox faith. For the Bolsheviks, the Church and its associated ultranationalist movement, were a reactionary clerical bloc that stood for counter-revolution. As Lenin (1909) observed, in the view of the old ruling elite, “to keep the people in spiritual bondage, there must be the closest possible alliance of the Church and the Black Hundreds,” emphasizing the intimate relationship between autocratic religious authority and reactionary political violence in maintaining social hierarchies.
Thus, in destroying the Church, the Bolsheviks reasoned, it was necessary that its various customs, traditions, and symbols be swept away as well, as any vestige or remnant could serve as a focal point for cultural continuity that could be leveraged for a return of clericalism, a vehicle for counter-revolution. For these reasons, Lenin was clear that there would be no Christmas, and those who dared celebrate it were prosecuted throughout the 1920s and 1930s. However, despite their best efforts, Christmas, in some form, endured.
Bumping because the full article for whatever reason appears to be free now whilst it was partially paywalled at time of original post.
If it is paywalled for you this is the part not yet available on archive.is
, its development deeply entwined with the genealogy of holiday consumer culture and marketing practices (Schmidtt 1995, 186). Christmas remains a peculiar holiday in that it is defined by both sacred and commercial elements, which not only coexist but are co-constitutive, mutually reinforcing one another.
Anti-Christmas
For the Soviet state, Christmas’ close associations with consumer culture, the reactionary Orthodox Church, and religious superstition made opposition to the holiday a self-evident conclusion and a necessary stage in their making of a new kind of civilization. This is a view that continues to leave those unfamiliar with or outside that revolutionary ideological framework both appalled and confused as to why anyone could “hate” Christmas. The Christian ethos of charity and almsgiving, which shaped the Christmas culture of giving, was conceived by the Bolsheviks as fundamentally insincere and hypocritical, masking the real structural relations of exploitation and, in doing so, implicitly perpetuating them. The Bolsheviks understood themselves as approaching history and society through a scientific, rational lens, viewing the development of socialism as a lasting and genuine way of resolving the contradictions of society, such as intractable poverty—not Christian compassion.
The new revolutionary government formally separated church and state, nationalized church property, banned religious education, and adopted the Gregorian calendar. In this, they fundamentally reshaped how holidays were observed: Sundays were no longer guaranteed as days of rest for all workers, and several new official holidays were introduced, a calendar revamp which had Christmas removed entirely. January now featured New Year’s celebrations and the Day of Commemoration of the 1905 Revolution. Furthermore, the restructuring of the calendar allowed the Bolsheviks to transform the Christmas season from a religious observance into an opportunity to promote Soviet values, especially anti-clericalism and militant atheism. In a 1921 Pravda article, Bukharin articulated this sentiment, writing that “young people should not be dried out… We need to pay attention to popularizing our worldview; we need influence not only on the minds, but also on the sense of youth” (Tabunshchikova 2016, 2). Banishing religious Christmas festivities, the Soviets transformed the holiday into a pedagogical platform, highlighting “the pagan traditions that preceded Nativity celebrations” and attempting to demonstrate the inherent arbitrariness of all religions by having participants dress as Allah, Buddha, Osiris, and Orthodox priests. The “Komsomol Christmas” targeted all major religions to avoid giving the impression that Bolshevik opposition was directed solely at Orthodoxy, rather than at religion in general. One communist youth speaker noted:
Just from the fact that we are burning effigies of all sorts of gods, what will we arrange demonstrations at all synagogues, churches and mosques, it is clear that we use the holiday to speak out against all religions (Tabunshchikova 2016, 177)Silano notes how the didactic function of these performances “was likely overshadowed by aggressive antireligious activities,” such as the burning of holy and sacred icons, including Jesus and the saints (Silano, 2020, 470). Given the deeply entrenched influence of religion in Russia, such brazen anti-Christian attitudes profoundly off-putting for everyday citizens, and played a role in the Soviet change of approach to Christmas. Foreshadowing the Stalinist future of the holidays, we see some initial attempts of the Leninist government to Bolshevize the traditional Christmas spirit of compassion even amidst their relentless anti-Christmas and anti-Christian propaganda. Silano (2020, 472) writes:
The year was 1919 and Russia was in the midst of its bloody Civil War, but that did not stop Lenin from asking Bonch- Bruevich to join him in celebrating the elka with schoolchildren in Sokolniki, a district on the outskirts of Moscow. Bonch-Bruevich claimed the children had surrounded the Bolshevik leader as he sang songs, played games, and prepared their tea, watching over the children,‘as if they were all his family’... The story was soon adapted for children and became a central myth of Soviet New Year’s in a volume complete with socialist realist drawings of Lenin and young children around the elka…. Whereas in Dostoevsky’s story Jesus had come as the saviour of cold and starving children, Lenin was now being introduced as the friend of children in troubled times.The Soviets quickly understood the power of cultural narratives. And began the long and contradictory process of transforming Christmas, building an alternative socialist holiday folk mythology that was still compatible with their overarching communist worldview. Here, they sought to evoke the familiar comfort of Christmas by supplanting stock Christmas characters in familiar Christmas scene, like Jesus or Santa, with Lenin, who was seen as a true embodiment of a just and fair society. Grandfather Frost, the Russian Santa Claus, at least initially, did not fare well. He was “unmasked” by the Bolsheviks “as an ally of the priest and the kulak” (Petrone 2020, 86). Symbols and characters too closely associated with Christian tradition were forcefully spurned in this attempt to reformulate the holidays.
However, the attempts to Bolshevize winter festivities by infusing them with revolutionary content largely failed, and the Soviet state then focused on suppressing Christmas celebrations instead. The anti-Christmas attitudes were further accelerated during Stalin’s “revolution from above,” where the leader’s seismic industrial transformation was accompanied by a cultural one; the fashioning of the new Soviet man, whose development was supposed to mirror that of the rapidly modernizing state. Rational, industrious, and forward-thinking, the idealized Soviet proletariat, forged in the crucible of revolution, was one who had no need for the backward superstitions of the past, and these should be pushed aside with ease. Stalin’s state went ahead with banning familiar Christmas customs entirely, such as the beloved Russian Elka Tree, a holiday staple, which even Lenin had no problems with as long as it was sufficiently dissociated from Christian themes. The Elka tree was characterized as a symbol of bourgeois excess, representing the divide between the rich and the poor, given its association with the celebrations of wealthy families and societal elites. More than that, it was denounced as “economic evil” that led to the wasteful and unnecessary destruction of fir trees for commercial purposes. For the new Stalinist epoch, the leadership tried to reframe the holidays, reformulating the meaning of New Year’s yet again:
During the First Five Year Plan, New Year’s Day was a production- and accounting-oriented holiday with many carnivalesque elements. In 1930, the entertainment at a New Year’s Day event at a major Moscow factory included a brigade from the Meyerhold Theater that sang to the workers about waste in the factory. Their song asserted, for example, that if 1,000 people were to choose not to come to work on a religious holiday it would cost the factory 48,000 rubles. The shortcomings of the last economic year were also put on trial and then buried. In 1930, the theme of production was the core element of a celebration that could be characterized as carnivalesque. The celebration endorsed the mockery of those who did not work efficiently and incorporated the traditional carnival element of the burial of the old year (Petrone 2000, 86)This was yet another mostly failed reinvention of Christmas. It is not that socialist populism was unable to mobilize Soviet citizens; its people by and large believed in the messaging of the state and actively participated in its grassroots engagement initiatives, even if they did so in ways that differed from the expectations of the leadership (for instance, see Samantha Lomb’s work on the state engagement with the population for the Stalin constitution). What did not stick was a thoroughly communist Christmas substitute; a didactic, labour-centered celebration could simply not replicate the emotional resonance and ritual familiarity of Christmas. This prompted the Soviet state to adopt an approach not dissimilar to the Christian relation to paganism: subsume the existing festivities within their own ideological framework while keeping the specific traditions themselves intact. The Soviet statesman Pavel Postyshev played a key role in the normalization of outlawed Christmas traditions:
Now that we have the opportunity to give the children of workers this joyful holiday, we ourselves forbid the fir tree, as a priest’s prejudice. But we ourselves cannot think up a good, happy holiday for children’s handlers. By the way, our priests were smarter. The fir tree is not a Christian custom, but it crossed over to us from paganism ... and priests did not begin fighting with it, but instead used it in their interests (Petrone 2020, 86).Postyshev’s observation was an astute one. He understood the utility of the traditional holidays as a form of mass mobilization and state-building, and that such customs could be plucked from their original ideological context and placed in a new framework, which is precisely what happened. However, this is not to say that Soviet holidays were a simple rebranding, but a kind of reconstruction that maintained beloved holiday norms while reshaping them along new social and political objectives quite unlike those of the previous regime.
Anyone got the full article?
