PETER HITCHENS: The last Noël in the USSR.
By the time we went to live there, at the end of the Gorbachev era, the festival was no longer actually banned in Soviet Moscow. Young Pioneers no longer patrolled the wintry streets searching for subversive Christmas trees, as they had done in the early years of the Leninist state. The air no longer trembled with the sound of cathedrals being dynamited, or of great bells being torn from their towers and spitefully smashed, as it had done in Stalin’s day. There were even attempts to restore some of the many Orthodox churches and monasteries desecrated and befouled by use as warehouses or reformatories.
The League of the Militant Godless, once a huge semi-official organization dedicated to mockery and hatred of God, of priests and believers, had quietly vanished during the war against Hitler. God had, during that odd period, proved a useful Comrade, at least as long as the war went on. He had been exiled and canceled again since, but not with quite the same scorn as before.
In any case, our western nativity festival was far too early for those remaining Russians who had somehow managed to cling to faith during the long decades of murder, desecration, intimidation and outright persecution. Orthodox Christmas, still governed by a more ancient calendar than ours, falls in early January. And in 1990, an Anglican Christmas in the Soviet capital was still a personal matter. St. Andrew’s Anglican Church, in Victorian times the center of a thriving English community on the very borders of western civilization, was still at that time requisitioned by a cold-hearted atheist government, and forced to serve as a state-run recording studio. So it was just us and a tatty copy of the 1662 Prayer Book.
The Kremlin had sought, fairly successfully, to blot out all recollection of the birth of Our Savior from normal life, especially among children. Instead it had encouraged a huge celebration of the New Year, just a few days before the Orthodox Nativity. Stalin had even abandoned his original attempt to eradicate the Russian Santa Claus, a hard-drinking, white-bearded character called Ded Moroz (Grandfather Frost) and his female subordinate, the Snow Maiden. People liked them too much, so the Communist Party had repurposed them to serve the new order. They were absorbed into the Atheist New Year festivities, including a communist New Year tree that looked suspiciously like a Christmas tree, unless adorned with an official red star.
The New Year feast was all-encompassing, impressive and impossible to ignore. The street on which we lived was an immensely wide avenue built for giants. It roared day and night with dirty, spluttering vehicles, its center lane much used by the Politburo’s huge, snarling limousines. Yet even this highway fell silent for the holiday. And in that dark city, it was astonishing to see the festive lights switched on, making it, for a few brief hours, as bright as a western capital. But this was not our celebration. It was its enemy. I have disliked the New Year heartily ever since.
Read the whole thing.
Related: The National Socialists Fought the Original War on Christmas.
And speaking of the Brothers Hitchens: Hitch-21: If Christopher Hitchens were alive today.
