With their hammers and sickles, cosmonauts and red stars, the decorations on many Russian Christmas trees still reflect the ebb and flow of a bygone atheist age as they grace the country’s homes from New Year’s Eve to Orthodox Christmas on January 7.
”I prefer to use my box of old Soviet decorations which are so evocative, [rather] than to hang up the new, often bland ones they sell today,” says Yelena Vitugina, a 40-year-old Moscow cook.
She is always touched by the sight of the doll replica of a traditional Uzbek girl in the 1950s, representing the crafts of Uzbekistan, one of the 15 sister republics of the Soviet Union — and, by extension, the eternal friendship of the Soviet peoples.
Today, amid increasing nostalgia for the Soviet era, Moscow market stalls, like those on the pedestrian Arbat Street, are helping to revive traditional Soviet decorations, with their ballerinas, parachutists and little red tractors.
The Christmas tree and the midnight dinner of New Year’s Eve, traditional in tsarist times, were banned by the atheistic Bolshevik regime of 1925 as ”bourgeois” symbols.
Ten years later, the New Year’s tree was rehabilitated by Stalin, although celebrations marking the birth of Christ — on the eve of January 7 in Orthodox tradition — would officially not take place again until the Soviet collapse of 1991.
In 1937, at the height of Stalin’s repressions, a gigantic fir tree topped with a red star was installed for the first time in the centre of Moscow. The first decorations displayed portraits of Lenin and Stalin, starting a tradition of a politically charged New Year’s festival.
In 1937 the people’s commissariat for education published a book entitled The New Year at the Nursery School, mentioning the fir tree ”crowned with a red star … symbolising a radiant and happy childhood made possible thanks to the [Communist] Party”.
Even if New Year’s Day was relatively unpoliticised compared with other national holidays, ”each historical or political twist found its illustration in the tree decorations”, says political analyst Boris Kagarlitsky. During World War II, trees were decorated with small tanks, guns, parachutists and rescue dogs.
Shortages forced Soviet citizens to learn to make decorations themselves by repainting worn bulbs or soaking objects in a solution soaked with salt to create a snow-crystal effect.
The designers of Soviet decorations watched the preferences of their leader closely, producing hockey players or circus acrobats as soon as Stalin evoked these professions in his speeches.
Then, in the reign of his agriculture-obsessed successor, Nikita Khrushchev, the first corn-ear baubles appeared on New Year’s trees.
The exploration of space gave life to innumerable cosmonaut decorations — echoing the angels of the Christian Christmas tree — as well as Soviet Sputniks and miniature rockets. Decorations representing bundled-up polar explorers and polar bears were another Soviet favourite.
With the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, factories making decorations found themselves without government orders or Communist Party guidance, and were forced to take their cues from the market. For the most part that led them to Western-style decorations.
But now nostalgia for Soviet kitsch is leading some back to the traditional Soviet designs of so many Russian childhoods. — Sapa-AFP