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94 Soviet celebrations staged the ideal of new Soviet reality in time and space, producing choreographed patterns of social hierarchy. Festivities were to follow nationwide standards designed in Moscow. They represented the future world worth working for and were part of the effort of doing so. But how, as a cultural practice and irrespective of the political theory, were celebrations actually organized in the 1920s and 1930s? Festivities are embedded in political and economic contexts; they do not happen in vacuums. There were times of shortages, upheaval, and terror. In order to have a wide social and spatial effect, the celebration needed to take hold at the periphery of the Soviet empire. To guarantee that Soviet celebrations were staged properly beyond the physical reach of Moscow, a basic logistic infrastructure needed to be in place. Exploring that organizational environment beyond Moscow raises such questions as how festivities were organized in the provinces, how the context of everyday life at the periphery influenced festive times and their perception, and if the staging of the brave new world changed the dynamics of the old, often filthy, ways of everyday life. Organizing and managing the celebrations often required communication among people who had very different levels of access to power. Cooperation and exchange turned the planning of festivities into a cultural practice, which prompts the question of how that communication influenced the making, style, and importance of Soviet celebrations. These are some of the aspects of the Soviet celebration worth exploring when we look at it as an interface of communication between the powerful and the less powerful, as a place of encounter where different interpretations of reality and ways to cope with it clashed. The Cultural Practice of Celebrating The celebration as a cultural practice was a chronotope where people communicated and negotiated power positions, exercised power, and/or felt helpless. Studying the Soviet celebration as a cultural practice involves more than examining whether the festivities pleased the spectators, and it involves more than assuming we can determine what people truly thought. In looking at the celebration as 4 Celebrating Soviet Festivals CELEBRATING SOVIET FESTIVALS • 95 a source of communication, it is natural to wonder what people made of it. We cannot ever know that, but what we can investigate is how the official order to celebrate was adapted and internalized. First, however, the limits of Soviet staging must be viewed. The theory-guided belief in the power of official representation and its absolute claim to the right way to interpret the world should not be confused with omnipotence. There were limits to feasibility, even for the mighty official canon of culture. A glance at the periphery—as other research has already shown—reveals a wholly different world than that at the center, with its proximity to the highest party and state potentates and extreme control. Outside of Moscow and Leningrad, the groups that supported Soviet high culture were smaller; other, tradition-oriented counterworlds were stronger. The means for implementing the Soviet idea of reality were not less violent, but they were more limited. This chapter investigates the Soviet celebration as practiced in Soviet-Russian provinces. There, festivities were contested practices, but their preparation also amounted to encounters that involved negotiations among a large number of people. There were stubborn and idiosyncratic ways of adapting official festive culture. It becomes clear that vital festive culture is less a product of officially decreed standards and more an amalgamation of very different lines of tradition. The question arises as to how much regional peculiarities influenced the Soviet celebration. In order to see what was specific to a region, we need to make comparisons; it is the only way to avoid taking something for regionally specific that was actually a general trend in other regions as well. It makes sense to select for comparison units that clearly differ. Thus, the text that follows contrasts the old, rather tradition-bound governorate capital Voronezh and its administrative backlands with Novosibirsk and the Kuznetsk Basin (Kuzbas)—a melting pot for the approaching phase of industrialization. The goal is to determine if there were differences in implementing the nationwide standards for festivities in the Voronezh area, marked more by traditional festivities and folklore, and the young, fast-growing cities along the Siberian frontier that lacked long settlement traditions and sturdy population structures. Voronezh and the Central Black Earth Region The governorate capital of Voronezh has a long history. Founded as a fortress at the edge of the steppe in...

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