Transformation of the New Year’s Holiday in the USSR: Reconstruction Based on Modern Memories of Soviet Childhood

Abstract

When studying the history of Soviet childhood, one needs to specifically focus on the key events encompassing the child’s life during the annual cycle, and the New Year celebration has been of paramount significance in that sense. The long evolution of this holiday and the shaping of its cultural practices reached a culmination point in the second half of the twentieth century. What is important is that these practices exerted decisive influence on the daily life of several generations including both families of those who stayed in the post-Soviet space and those of emigrees. It is therefore necessary to examine the transformations in the cultural and symbolic load of the New Year celebration that occurred in the context of complex interactions of pre-revolutionary Russian urban traditions and Soviet cultural projects. The study is based on the outcome of 139 semi-structured interviews conducted in eight Russian cities among persons born in 1946–1977, as well as the analysis of memoir literature. We argue that in the cultural load of the New Year celebration, there is a preponderance of family-oriented and childrenoriented content, which can be seen as a modification of the older Christmas tradition.