The expulsion of the Nativity of Christ from Russia began in 1922. Anti-Christmas propaganda was based on the agitation of the broad masses who doubted the old traditions and values. At the same time, the newspapers denounced the "conciliators" who saw in religious holidays only beautiful customs that did not interfere with communist construction …
Christmas is coming soon
Ugly bourgeois holiday …
The one who cut down the Christmas tree
He is ten times more harmful than the enemy, After all, on every tree
You can hang white!
Promotional video:
Proletarian poets wrote such verses soon after the revolution, and in 1922 the expulsion of the Nativity of Christ from Russia began.
It is noteworthy that before Christmas the first issue of the Atheist newspaper was published. Since the days of the main church holidays were still non-working, new, "revolutionary holidays" were invented - "Komsomol Christmas" and "Komsomol Easter", with the goal of "developing anti-religious propaganda and distracting young people and adults from celebrating in the church."
The half-naked and half-starved Komsomol was the shock detachment of the Communist Party in the anti-religious struggle. A special circular recommended that Komsomol members go around houses with a red star and singing revolutionary songs everywhere on Christmas days, “glorifying Soviet power like teenagers celebrate Christmas,” and arrange “red Christmas trees” decorated with five-pointed stars instead of figurines of angels and babies in a cradle and garlands of red flags.
In some places, Komsomol members have planned public burning of wooden models of temples of all religions for Christmas. There were rumors that the atheists would try to set fire to the existing churches that day, so the authorities even had to calm down believers from the pages of newspapers. The Komsomol "storm of heaven" began.
The cities were preparing for the "Komsomol Christmas" or "Komsomol". The atheist Sverdlovites and the red professors were mobilized for support. For the holiday, Yaroslavsky's brochure "How the Gods Are Born" was published. Meyerhold's workshops urgently worked on the blasphemous performances "Christmas Eve at the Komsomol Club" and "Immaculate Conception".
Working youth were shown films and read lectures exposing the "economic roots" and "pagan origins" of the Nativity of Christ, in order to prove that there is nothing sacred about the holidays. In the Voronezh province, trying to make the material more accessible to the audience, the lecturer appeared before them in the attire of a "Chaldean priest" and organized a "sacrifice" and a "pagan dance" at the Orthodox Church.
As the newspapers wrote, "the God-fearing Moscow philistine saw an unprecedented spectacle." An endless stream of people stretched along Petrovka, Sadovaya and Tverskaya, and thousands of flags, cardboard figures, posters fluttering above it, which read: "Religion is opium for the people", "Man created God in his own image." The "deposed gods" were transported in trucks: the gray-bearded "Father God" surrounded by the "saints", the yellow Buddha, the Babylonian Marduk.
The mummers portrayed rabbis, priests, but most of all, of course, were "priests" with beards attached and dressed in priestly vestments, confiscated or simply stolen from churches. They loudly promised the believers otherworldly blessings, while greedily rubbing their palms. Black and red "devils" in masks with horns ran screaming among the crowd.
Colorful posters with the inscription “1922 times the Mother of God gave birth to Christ, and 1923 times gave birth to the Komsomol” depicted the Mother of God looking at the baby with horror - he held the book “Historical Materialism” in his hand, and his head was crowned with a Red Army helmet. In front of the churches, the carnival made stops and "served prayers", singing "Holy nuns, all filled with fat" and "The priest had a dog."
The "Komsomolsk priest" loudly proclaimed: "Rejoice, O Marx, great miracle worker." Blasphemers, mockingly folding their hands and swearing, received a "blessing" from him. On a black coffin with "relics" sat a fake "monk". To the sounds of military bands, laughter and dashing singing "Oh, you, canopy, my canopy", figures of "representatives of heaven" were burnt on the square of the Alexandrovsky railway station.
We don't need rabbis, we don't need priests.
Beat the bourgeoisie, crush the kulaks …
Than to twist rings with censers, honoring the gods that did not exist, we are in Christmas Komsomolets
led godless processions.
Practically in all cities of Russia the Komsomol "gave battle to religion", holding mass anti-religious demonstrations on Christmas with mummers, torches, orchestras and singing revolutionary songs. In many places, church services have been postponed or canceled in an effort to avoid confrontation with the atheists.
In Tambov, the procession of young people was opened by a truck with a model of a bell mounted on it, swinging stuffed animals of Denikin, Kolchak, Poincaré, Curzon in the bell tongues. Then followed, dancing to the sounds of the orchestra, "priests", "rabbis", "officers", "Entente", "kulaks" and "Nepmen". Vigil was disrupted in Kozlov and Morshansk. In Borisoglebsk, Kirsanov, Lebedyan, to the beat of a drum and the singing of the Internationale, Komsomol members burned figures depicting God.
In Kursk, a godless carnival with songs approached the monastery, where he arranged the burning of "gods of all times and all peoples" with dancing around the fire and jumping over the fire. In Tsaritsyn, the Komsomol mummers with torches and stars, playing "Departure of the Gods", went to the operating churches, where they demonstrated the pantomime "The Liberation of Truth". In Lipetsk, they staged the play "Three Jesus" and organized a lecture in which they ridiculed the Immaculate Conception.
In Bogorodsk, a political trial took place over the believing youth, in Gorokhovets - over the hegumen. The revolutionary holiday ended in clubs, also called “new churches,” where activists in the costumes of “magi”, “bourgeois” and other “Christmastide” characters danced around the “Komsomol Christmas tree”.
The Komsomol committees boasted in their reports that they "made a huge noise among the philistine." When the carnival processions approached, the people, not wanting to look at the blasphemy, disgusting even for unbelievers, closed the gates and extinguished the lights in the houses.
In Poltava, after an anti-religious march, Komsomol members went to the outskirts of the city, where they demanded that residents let them into their apartments for caroling, threatening to deal with the "disobedient of the Soviet regime," which led to the beating of the atheists by indignant workers. The anti-religious commission was concerned about "a dull irritation among the peasant masses, anti-Semitic sentiments, a possible crop failure, which could be used as a result of godlessness."
Street processions and carnivals during church holidays, condemned by Lenin as "harmful mischief", were banned by the directives of the Communist Party, urging agitators to abandon "deliberately rude methods, mockery of objects of faith and cult." From now on, it was recommended that “Komsomol Easter” and “Komsomol Christmas” be concentrated within the walls of clubs, enterprises and barracks in the form of mass evenings with reports and performances.
One of the circulars pointed out that "anti-religious propaganda should be carried out in the form of explanations of natural science and political, undermining faith in God." Godless holidays were allowed to be celebrated only in cities, but not in the countryside, where the Komsomol members were called "outrages." The "storming of the skies" was replaced by a long siege.
The anti-Christmas campaign in December 1924 was held under the slogan of organizing the cells of the Society of Friends of the newspaper Atheists, which in the spring grew into the All-Russian Union of Atheists. They saw Christmas as nothing more than a "bourgeois relic".
The Leningradskaya Krasnaya Gazeta reported: “This year it is noticeable that Christmas prejudices have almost ceased. There are no trees in the bazaars - there are few unconscious people! " In fact, St. Petersburg was littered with Christmas trees brought by hungry peasants from suburban villages, but they stopped dismantling the trees: the people were in poverty, and they bought only small, "proletarian" trees to put on the table.
Mayakovsky wrote:
You buy a Christmas tree, and then there is no, which is beautiful, and the rest after the vyvyk forest tracts.
What kind of joy?
Disgusting!
Why did I stick with the trees?
My answer is short-lived:
nothing because of the dubious birth of Christ
millions to exterminate the trees born.
After Stalin at the party congress in 1927 pointed out to his comrades the unacceptable weakening of the anti-religious struggle, the propaganda of the atheists fell upon those who arranged the Christmas tree for the children.
“Until now, along with circling around the tree, parents are trying to instill in their children the sprouts of religion,” they wrote then in the Ogonyok magazine. - Religious parents, under the guise of a “merry Christmas tree,” impose “God” on children and other fables like “Christmas grandfather”. The cult of the Christmas tree brings great harm to the forests. It should have long ago put a limit to both the mystical harmful worship of the Christmas tree and the destruction of forests. We hope that the agitation of the union of the atheists will finally break the senseless custom. Instead of putting the tree on the cross, let's put the cross on the tree!"
The chairman of the Union of Atheists Yaroslavsky insisted on involving children in anti-religious activities. Particular attention was paid to schools and pioneer detachments. Preschool institutions reported that they were switching to "education of active atheists." Pioneers came to kindergartens and explained to the kids that “workers, peasants and their children should not celebrate Christmas and arrange a Christmas tree.
Communists, Komsomol members, pioneers do not celebrate this holiday, but will explain and persuade everyone who does not yet know not to celebrate bourgeois holidays. " "To celebrate Christmas is to celebrate slavery with ignorance!" Declared "Komsomolskaya Pravda", and through the lips of the popular futurist poet Kirsanov proclaimed:
Christmas trees dry rod
Looms in our eyes
By the hat of Santa Claus, Angela - in the teeth!
But so far, the trees have not yet been “evicted” even from the apartments of many party and Komsomol workers. The newspaper Leninsky Put sharply criticized their position in the editorial article "Religion in the Life of Communists and Komsomol Members" in February 1929:
“Our Christmas tree heroes justify themselves by referring to the fact that Lenin arranged Christmas trees for the children, and they wanted to make the children happy. It must be remembered that "every vegetable has its own time" and, which was tolerable at the beginning of Soviet power, was completely unacceptable in the 12th year of the October Revolution. Why is it necessary to provide joy to children with a Christmas tree at Christmas, when the tree is in the nature of religious rites, and why not arrange Christmas trees in the days of the October Revolution, the Paris Commune or the fall of the autocracy?"
In the summer of 1929, the Anti-Religious Commission under the Central Committee decided to launch a decisive offensive against the "churchmen and sectarians" by the forces of party, Komsomol, trade union organizations and, of course, the Union of Atheists. The Second Congress of the Atheists renamed its half-million organization the Union of Militant Atheists, which should have clearly marked the transition to more active action.
Youth publications again filled with headlines such as: "To storm the sky!", "Workers do not need Christian Christmas", "Easter is the holiday of former people", "The holiday of Nepmen, kulaks and bourgeoisie", etc. In the autumn of the same year, " the first godless five-year plan ", pursuing the goal of" complete deification of the country "and" elimination of all remnants of religious life."
On September 24, 1929, the Council of People's Commissars issued a decree on the transition to the Soviet calendar with a five-day week, canceling Sundays and all holidays except November 7 and May 1. "We won't give a single truancy on Christmas!" - this was the slogan of those days. "The irrevocable and complete elimination of the celebration of 'Christmas', which began this year, its transformation into a working day is one of the major new achievements on the path of restructuring the working life on new cultural and socialist principles," the Leningrad newspaper Krasnaya Gazeta noted.
In December, the councils banned the sale of Christmas trees and "Christmas tree rubbish" "for use in connection with religious customs and rituals." The execution was monitored by the police, those responsible for the violation were punished with fines and forced labor.
On the eve of Christmas, decisions were made on the massive closure and demolition of churches, the confiscation of churches for clubs and schools. A week before the holiday, the Cathedral of the Miracle of Archangel Michael was blown up in the Chudov Monastery in the Kremlin. The labor collectives of factories and factories, competing with each other, made decisions about the delivery of church bells for the needs of industry.
Following the example of Leningrad, “godless” workshops appeared everywhere, and it was proposed to rename Podolsk near Moscow to the city of Godless. On Christmas Eve, anti-religious lotteries and contests for the "best atheist" were held in workers' clubs. Workers, men and women, were forced to sign formal declarations of apostasy from religion with blasphemy against God, under the threat of deprivation of their homes, cards for bread and clothes.
In its scope, the anti-Christmas of 1930 was unmatched. For the godless carnival, revived after six years of oblivion, enterprises and institutions were preparing for a May Day or October demonstration.
The December "Anti-Religious" recommended the production of anti-Christmas costumes under the names "catcher", "parasite", "holy rubbish", "priest's tool" and contained extensive methodological materials for organizing children's godless leisure.
Young citizens were offered the games “godless campaign”, “priest runs”, “godless machine gun”, “anti-religious shooting range”, where they had to throw balls at targets depicting priests and churches. For the needs of the masquerade, the city authorities allocated crosses and church vestments from the property of closed churches.
Competitions for the delivery of icons and church books were timed to coincide with the Christmas days. For example, workers of "Proletarka" in Tver took 1,200 icons out of their dormitories and apartments for public destruction, the miners of the Red Profintern mine in Yenakiev collected 870 icons.
Anti-religious exhibitions were held in shop windows, atheistic leaflets were distributed everywhere, and an entry into the Union of Militant Atheists, which tripled in number, took place. The capital's atheists sent dozens of propaganda teams to the towns and villages of the Moscow region.
Izvestia wrote: “For 1930 years an absurd Christmas fairy tale has been walking around the world, concocted to please the parasites. Putting a yoke around the worker's neck, hitting the revolution on the head with a cross - this is the mean class meaning of the Christmas legend."
On Christmas Day, a carnival "funeral of religion" was held on an unprecedented scale in all cities and many villages. Columns of demonstrators marched with red banners and anti-religious posters, Komsomol members of the Komsomol were transported by trucks to the "priests" and "monks".
Christmas trees prepared for burning were erected on the squares with dolls hanging on them, depicting priests. Speakers inspiredly denounced the "class essence" of religion at rallies, shouting: "All to the Union of Atheists!", "Long live the Five-Year Plan!", "Churches for schools!", "Bells for tractors!" Already at dusk, dancing began, thousands of icons stacked in pyramids flamed, Christmas trees - symbols of the “bourgeois holiday of the past” - lit up.
A mass celebration of Moscow residents on Christmas day due to severe frosts did not take place and was postponed to Epiphany. By the evening of January 19, about a hundred thousand people gathered in the Park of Culture and Leisure, there were groups of torchbearers, orchestras, posters and, of course, trucks with mummers of Komsomol members.
Among the huge crowd, here and there bonfires of icons, church books, caricature models, coffins of religion flared up spontaneously. Correspondents enthusiastically described the performance shown near the Park of Culture, at the Krasnye Khamovniki skating rink: “Gods and priests rushed with church songs, waving crosses, for the“five-year plan,”a detachment of Budennovists appeared and fired a volley, the church caught fire from the shots, the church burned down; this church fire was shown extremely impressively."
In every school and kindergarten there were posters with slogans like “We don’t need Christmas trees smelling of incense!”, “Parents, don’t confuse us - don’t make a Christmas tree!”.
At the school "anti-Christmas parties" they played priests ridiculed songs and sang "godless" verses: "Ding-bom, ding-bom, we won't go to church anymore." Children's magazines called out to young readers: "Now we must all fight against the Christmas tree!"
So, "Young Naturalist" posted on its pages articles under the titles "Harm of the Christmas tree" and "Christmas - a priest's tale", which called on "not to spend a penny on this holiday", and "Siskin" published a poem from the poet found in children's literature -avant-gardist Vvedensky "We will not allow", in which there were the following words:
Only the one who is the friend of the priests, The Christmas tree is ready to celebrate!
You and I are enemies of priests, We don't need Christmas.
From year to year, people gathered for anti-Christmas rallies, which ended with dancing and burning a Christmas tree. There was something pagan about this burning, and he was loved. Only a few families now dared to secretly set up a Christmas tree, tightly draping the windows with blankets so that they could not be seen from the street.
Carrying the forbidden tree, they sawed it into two or three pieces, which were hidden in a bag from the Komsomol patrols, and at home they were again fastened together with a tire. But the inspectors also went to their homes, looking out for the trees. Nevertheless, the anti-religious struggle began to decline again, and the work of the Union of Militant Atheists, which formally grew to 6 million members, began to fall apart, despite loud reports of success.
But the most devastating blow to Christmas celebrations was not prohibitive measures. A couple of days before the new year, 1936, the newspaper Pravda published a note by the old Bolshevik Postyshev entitled “Let's organize a good Christmas tree for the children for the New Year!”. It wrote:
“Some, not otherwise than the“left”, benders denounced this children's entertainment as a bourgeois venture. Follow this misjudgment of the tree, which is great fun for children, to end it."
Pavel Postyshev, cartoon by Boris Efimov, 1935.
Postyshev's initiative was agreed personally with Stalin, and his note already contained an order to local councils to arrange a "good Soviet Christmas tree" in all cities and collective farms, in all schools, orphanages, pioneer palaces, children's clubs, cinema and theaters.
The happiness of the people knew no bounds: within an hour, 700 fir trees were bought at the Zatsepsky market in Moscow, and 400 at the small Teterinsky market. True, there was nothing to decorate, no one would have had time to blow toys so quickly. But, the need for invention is cunning! GUM's grocery store No. 1, two days before the holiday, sold out a year's supply of walnuts for Christmas tree decorations …
The decree of the Council of People's Commissars introduced a public official celebration of the New Year, but not Christmas. At the same time, Christmas tree fun fell out during strict fasting among Orthodox Christians. The Soviet New Year's ritual was hastily developed, which filled the old Christmas tradition with a different meaning. The Christmas tree has turned into a New Year tree.
It was no longer crowned with an eight-pointed star of Bethlehem, but a red five-pointed one, and the toys depicted not only animals and birds, but also “heroes of the revolution”, and the balls were decorated with portraits of Lenin, Stalin, Marx and Engels.
On February 26, 1938, Postyshev was expelled from the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks for "excessive cruelty", removed from all posts and arrested, and exactly a year later, on February 26, 1939, he was shot in Butyrka prison.
No one was going to execute the Christmas tree, and in 1949, January 1 became a non-working day.
There were no more attempts to cancel the tree, but they try not to remember the fact that it was once not New Year's but Christmas tree until now …
Mikhail FOMIN