New Year has become a familiar and traditional holiday for us - in recent decades it has been celebrated in a rather monotonous manner: with an elegant Christmas tree, a festive table and the speech of the head of the country. But for the Soviet people it was a completely different holiday: they were preparing for it long before the offensive, literally collecting treats and New Year's paraphernalia bit by bit.
Today we would like to tell and show you how the preparations for this joyful and warm holiday in the USSR went.
From 1918 to 1935, New Year was not an official public holiday, but most families traditionally celebrated it alongside Christmas. Thus, in the first decades of the Soviet Union, the holiday was considered more of a "family" holiday.
For the first time, the holiday was officially celebrated only at the end of 1936, after an article by a prominent Soviet figure Pavel Postyshev in the newspaper Pravda. Here is a small excerpt from it: “Why do we have schools, orphanages, nurseries, children's clubs, palaces of pioneers depriving the children of the working people of the Soviet country of this wonderful pleasure? Some, not otherwise than "leftist" bendingists, denounced this children's entertainment as a bourgeois venture. Follow this misjudgment of the Christmas tree, which is great fun for children, to end.
Komsomol members, pioneer workers should arrange collective Christmas trees for children on New Year's Eve. In schools, orphanages, in pioneer palaces, in children's clubs, in children's cinemas and theaters - there should be a children's tree everywhere! City councils, chairmen of district executive committees, village councils, and public education bodies must help arrange a Soviet Christmas tree for the children of our great socialist homeland."
The state allowed to celebrate the New Year, but January 1 remained a working day.
Promotional video:
1941, Column Hall of the House of the Unions.
1942, a group of scouts of the Western Front celebrates the New Year. The samovar is likely to contain alcohol.
The famous photographer Emmanuel Evzerikhin captured his family at the Christmas tree, 1954.
New Year's performance in the early 1950s.
It was only after the war that the traditions of celebrating the New Year in the USSR began to really take shape. Christmas tree decorations began to appear: at first, very modest ones - made of paper, cotton wool and other materials, later - beautiful, bright ones, made of glass and similar to the decorations of pre-revolutionary Christmas trees.
Of course, the toys could not escape the Soviet symbols - the trees were decorated with all kinds of scarlet stars, airships and images of pioneers and Octobrists.
It was necessary to prepare for the holidays in the USSR ahead of time. First, to buy food - that is, "get it", stand in hourly queues, get sprats, caviar, and smoked sausage in grocery orders.
It was imperative to cook Olivier, jellied meat, jellied fish, carrot and beetroot salads, herring under a fur coat, open pickled cucumbers and tomatoes harvested from the summer, which, due to the lack of seasonal vegetables, were an integral part of the festive table.
Those who had an acquaintance of a seller in a grocery store could afford brandy for 4 rubles 12 kopecks for New Year, semi-sweet champagne “Soviet”, tangerines.
Ready-made cakes were also in short supply, so basically they had to bake themselves.
Or stand in line for a long time, as in this photo.
Secondly, it was necessary to provide the child with a ticket to the New Year's tree, a present, a gauze snowfield costume or a bunny outfit and tangerines. A gift, which included caramels, apples, and walnuts, was given to parents by the trade union committee. Every child's dream was to get to the main Christmas tree of the country - first to the Column Hall of the House of Unions, and after 1954 - to the Kremlin Christmas tree.
Vocational school students came to the Kremlin New Year's holiday in national costumes. Even the stairs are tightly packed! 1955 year.
Film actress Klara Luchko at the Christmas tree, 1968.
Thirdly, every Soviet woman absolutely needed a new fashionable dress - it could be sewn with your own hands or in an atelier, in rare cases - bought from blackmail. The store was the last place where you could actually get yourself an appropriate new thing.
New Year's gifts are another test for Soviet citizens in the process of preparing for the New Year. There was tension with any goods in the country, but with beautiful goods it was even worse, so our parents went to visit, taking champagne, sausage (preferably "Cervelat"), canned exotic fruits (pineapples), cans of red and black caviar and boxes chocolates.
"Nothing makes a woman more beautiful than hydrogen peroxide" - this thesis became as relevant as possible on the eve of every New Year's celebration in the Soviet Union. The phrase "beauty salon" would not have been understood by the most inveterate women of fashion. They signed up for hairdressing salons in a few weeks, preparing hairstyles, make-up and the entire “New Year's look” required from Soviet women a maximum of time, ingenuity and independence - sometimes the hairstyles were done by the skillful hands of friends.
In one of the hairdressers in Moscow, December 1982.
The last stage of preparation is to wipe (fix) the TV, which, according to the postman Pechkin, is "the best decoration on the New Year's table." "Carnival Night", "Irony of Fate", "New Year's Adventures of Masha and Viti", "Blue Light", "Morozko" - Soviet films, programs and cartoons in the morning, without which not a single Soviet citizen could imagine a festive night.