Every year in late December, my childhood home transformed into a vision of American bliss. We’d gather to ornament a tree, drape string lights around the house, and sit down to an elaborate feast. Not long after dawn the next day, while our little sister still slept, my brother and I would impatiently sneak downstairs to see our gifts, which we understood to have been delivered by a kindly old man. It could have been a scene out of A Christmas Story. Except we weren’t celebrating Christmas. My family was celebrating the Soviet version of New Year’s, a holiday that resembles Christmas in nearly every way, except that it takes place almost a week later and excludes Jesus, God, or any other signifier of religion. We were keeping the national tradition alive in suburban America, years after the country that invented it had dissolved.
Soviet New Year’s began as a ritual in a country where all the religious rituals were gone. Long before the 1917 revolution that brought them to power, the leaders of the Soviet Union had decried religion as, in Karl Marx’s phrase, the opium of the masses. Their officially atheist government suppressed many kinds of spiritual observance, including Christmas. But by the mid-1930s, Soviet leaders sensed that people needed something to take the edge off in the dead of winter, a carnivalesque custom of the sort that Christmas once provided. So they took the most fun parts of the Christian holiday and plopped them on New Year’s.
It became arguably the most important holiday on the country’s calendar. Other celebrations tended to come with historical significance, such as the anniversary of the revolution and of the Soviets’ victory in World War II. But New Year’s, at its core, was about nothing more and nothing less than family: a chance to come together and take stock. That may be a big reason it survived the Union’s dissolution. Even after religious institutions were allowed to conduct their services without government interference and their holidays were acknowledged, New Year’s remained important for both the people who had left the region and those who still lived there.
But today, Soviet New Year’s customs are in danger of slipping away or evolving beyond recognition. Some people still celebrate the holiday the old way, with their families and gifts. Many, though, are establishing new practices that reflect new values and new political circumstances: Wars between former Soviet republics, for instance, and the ways that political leaders have used the momentous nature of the night for their own gains, have changed how people celebrate. A holiday that once felt embedded in the identity and culture of the Soviet people may soon become untethered from its history.
Soviet New Year’s began at a time when morale in the country was, in general, low. It was the 1930s, and Ukraine had suffered one of the worst man-made famines in world history. The idea to bring joy to the winter came from a Communist Party leader named Pavel Postyshev, who had been one of the famine’s administrators. During an intimate car ride around Moscow with General Secretary Joseph Stalin and a future successor, Nikita Khrushchev, Postyshev proposed reviving the tradition of trees, but tied to a secular holiday. Stalin enthusiastically endorsed the idea, and in 1935, a letter from Postyshev appeared in Pravda, the official newspaper of the party’s central committee, arguing that all Soviet children should get to experience the cheer that the bourgeoisie’s children once had: “Let’s organize a fun New Year’s Eve party for the kids.”
Postyshev’s idea spread like a wildfire in reverse—trees sprang up across the Soviet Union. The first year, delegates from the local party leadership and schoolteachers gathered parents and instructed them in how to decorate a tree. In some schools, Grandfather Frost, a Santa Claus equivalent, distributed gifts to kids. Soon, families adopted the new practice as their own. But Postyshev never got to see the extent of it. In the ’30s, Stalin consolidated power, punishing anyone he suspected of opposing him, including Postyshev—who was executed in 1939. The holiday soon became another tool for Stalin to reinforce his power and centrality in Soviet life. “The cheerful, happy children sang, danced, recited poems, praising in the songs and poems of their beloved Stalin, who gave them a joyful and happy life,” one 1938 newspaper report read.
Read: Understanding Stalin
After Stalin died, in 1953, the holiday’s focus turned away from politics. In 1956, Khrushchev delivered a speech criticizing Stalin’s “cult of personality” and his purges, signaling to people that they could drop the anxieties about political correctness that had constricted their lives in the Stalin era. The film Carnival Night, released that same year, captured the iconoclastic mood. In it, workers resist the efforts of their company director to organize a New Year’s celebration in which everything is acceptable to the people above him and no fun for those below. He plans to deliver a speech, but a worker persuades a magician to make the text disappear; when the director later goes to grab it, he instead finds a string of scarves and other knickknacks. The company director, representing a self-aggrandizing political blowhard, is humiliatingly sidelined, and the workers have a grand time.
By the time my dad started celebrating New Year’s in Moscow, in the ’60s, most of the elements of the holiday I would come to know as a kid were present: family dinner, gifts, and a decorated tree. It had become an unquestioned fulcrum of Soviet life. If there was a custom of reading poems or singing songs in Khrushchev’s honor, it wasn’t ubiquitous. Once the country’s leaders began giving an annual New Year’s address, in 1970, these speeches weren’t taken seriously. They were filled with empty platitudes, “void of meaning,” according to The Invention of Russia, by the journalist Arkady Ostrovsky. “These addresses were merely a prompt for popping the corks from bottles.”
That cork-popping continued even as the Soviet Union dissolved and many people left the region. I was born in Moscow in 1996, five years after the fall of the Union, and we moved to upstate New York five years after that. For a long time, the New Year’s my family celebrated was stuck in amber, the old tree-and-gifts version. In the former Soviet republics, people still considered the day significant but changed some of the customs. In Armenia, for instance, once religious holidays were again allowed, religious institutions attached themselves to New Year’s. From the early 1990s until 2023, the head of the national Church would deliver a midnight address right before the country’s president or prime minister. Tigran Simyan, a professor at Yerevan State University who studies the evolution of New Year’s in Armenia and the post-Soviet world, told me, “Our happy New Year, for us, is more important than Christmas.”
Read: When the Soviets voted
Politics also returned to the holiday after the Soviet Union’s fall. In Russia, the seeming end of single-party rule and a brief moment of political competition revived the status of the New Year’s address. It was a rare time when all eyes were focused on the same speaker. The Russian Federation’s first president, Boris Yeltsin, strategically resigned on December 31, 1999, giving his handpicked successor, Vladimir Putin, the opportunity to introduce himself during a midnight address as the millennium turned. “The ritual was unmistakably staged,” Ostrovsky writes in The Invention of Russia. “The New Year’s address had greater symbolic value than any election.”
In more recent times, young Russians have tended to focus on partying on New Year’s Eve. But the many people who maintain the Soviet way of celebrating at home with family might still put on Putin’s address. Once again, a popular film captures the mood. The plot of 2010’s Yolki is almost the exact opposite of Carnival Night’s. Whereas the 1956 film is about a collaborative effort to prevent a speech, Yolki features people across the country working together to help a girl on her quixotic quest to insert a phrase into the president’s midnight address, granting the address central importance. Yolki was the first in what became Russia’s most financially successful non-animated film franchise, despite the series’ declining artistic and entertainment value. Its 12th sequel, set as ever on New Year’s Eve, came out this December.
Eventually, politics’ creep back into the New Year’s holiday began to affect the way my family celebrated in the United States. Although for years, none of us took what Putin said in his address too seriously, my grandparents still put it on out of habit. But as his regime grew more repressive and violent, we let that go. The way I remember it, we stopped after Russia’s initial invasion of Ukraine, in 2014, deciding that we didn’t need to support Putin’s rule on our holiday. But my dad dates our move away from the midnight address to earlier, in 2012. That year, Putin stepped through a loophole in constitutional term limits and returned to the presidency, then brutally suppressed the protests that followed. “I didn’t want to hear him anymore,” my dad told me recently.
After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in February 2022, some Ukrainians’ New Year’s celebrations stopped. “What is there to celebrate when there is a war?” a Ukrainian soldier serving on the front line asked Euronews last New Year’s. Meanwhile, I spent last New Year’s in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, where clubs had just been closed for weeks in deference to protests over the government pausing its European Union accession bid. Though some young people I talked with were spending the night with their family, many spilled out onto Rustaveli Avenue in the city center for a combination party, protest, and celebration. Without a single state to hold it together, and so many interstate conflicts, the Soviet New Year’s tradition is splintering across the Soviet diaspora.
Read: What I learned from the Georgia protests
Perhaps soon the holiday will become unrecognizable from its former iteration, especially as the people who remember its origins adapt to new cultures or pass away. My own family no longer makes a point of gathering on the holiday. In part, that’s because my siblings and I have gotten older, scattered, and given in to assimilationist pressure—the fear of missing out on the American custom of partying with our friends on New Year’s. But we’ve also lost the center of gravity that held us to the Soviet tradition. Early in November, my last surviving grandmother suffered a stroke, which paralyzed most of her body, leaving only her eyes and one arm fully mobile. Her grandfather, my great-great-grandfather, became a Bolshevik in 1905 and participated in the three revolutions that led to the establishment of the Soviet Union. His son, her father, wrote and disseminated anti-religious propaganda. Much of my family’s adherence to the holiday might very well be because of this history. On Thanksgiving, days before my grandmother died, I told her I was researching our holiday tradition. She squeezed my hand and blinked knowingly.
Watching the tradition slip away feels like losing part of the Soviet and post-Soviet identity that’s defined my family for more than a century. I feel a grief that’s hard to disentangle from my grief for the people who passed the tradition on to me. But looking back on how my family has acted in decisive moments, I’m also aware of an opportunity. My forefathers helped form the Soviet identity and its rituals, even before there was a country to promote them. Likewise, during and after the Soviet Union’s existence, although politicians repeatedly imposed a tone that fit their priorities, my family chose how to spend the day. Ultimately, the common people reshaped the holiday to suit their needs and values. Their examples prove that people can make their own traditions, with whatever ideals they inherit.
When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
