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31 The history of official Bolshevik mass celebrations begins on May 1, 1918. On the first big red-letter day following the takeover of power in October 1917, the Bolsheviks demonstrated who was the new master in both Moscow and St. Petersburg and announced their official and exclusive claim to the symbols and celebrations of the revolutionary movement. The First of May was not a new holiday for the labor movement; what was new was that the Bolsheviks had nationalized it. The chief organizer of the event later said, “Yes, the May celebration was official. The nation celebrated that day. The power of the state revealed itself in many things. But isn’t even the mere thought exciting—that the state, until then our worst enemy, was now celebrating our First of May as its greatest holiday?”1 With this statement, Anatoly Lunacharsky summed up how things had changed since the October Revolution. Experts, Commissions, and Festival Planning Before the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks were an illegal and marginalized party. Afterward, they presented themselves as the new state power; they reformed chronology, introduced the Red Calendar, and redefined national heraldry.2 Bolshevik celebrations and symbols were meant to mark the break with both the old regime of the tsars and the provisional government and to reflect what was absolutely new about revolutionary Soviet power. Thus, the October Revolution meant a fundamental change in official festivities and symbols. From Bolshevik Celebration to State Celebration The Bolsheviks gained power over the symbols by both bequest and usurpation, and within a very short time. As early as 1918, the new regime created an extremely sturdy canon of celebrations and symbols. The hammer and sickle were new symbols of the state, the red star became the emblem for the Red Army, “The International ” was made the new anthem, the red flag became the new national flag, and, most significantly, the anniversary of the October Revolution became the most important national holiday. Within a short time, all the symbols of the dynasty 2 Inventing Soviet Festivals 32 • INVENTING SOVIET FESTIVALS and the bourgeoisie were forged into new symbols of Bolshevism. When it came to symbols, the state did not perish in the revolution: the Bolsheviks invented new traditions with intensity and focus.3 They did so by introducing new elements into the canon of symbols and rituals and by picking up and changing older traditions. May 1, 1918—the first official Bolshevik mass celebration—is a good example of the characteristic mixture of invention and usurpation. The Bolsheviks made the traditional holiday of the labor movement their own red-letter day and declared it a public holiday under the new regime. No other voices were heard that day. As with the concept of “revolution” and the symbol of the “red flag,” here, too, the Bolsheviks took May 1 out of the hands of the (“real”) social-revolutionaries, the Mensheviks, and other competitors and made it an insignia of Bolshevist rule.4 But the Bolsheviks depended on the active support of the like-minded and their followers among avant-garde artists and theater directors to produce festive demonstrations that would be more than mere manifestations of armed power. Enough willing persons could be found in the milieu of futurists and symbolists who were as little disturbed by the coup as they were by the Bolshevik usurpation of festivities. Through their involvement in planning by the official committee for celebrations, this group of people put their aesthetic stamp on May 1, 1918. And so the first official holiday of the Bolsheviks was colorful and diverse.5 The public squares in Petrograd and Moscow were decorated in different themes by different artists. And the festivities had no clear core that was privileged by choreography: as the Bolsheviks’ chief organizer, Anatoly Lunacharsky was uncertain which part of the event in Petrograd was to be considered the actual highlight of the festival. He drove back and forth between the demonstration on the Field of Mars, the many concerts given in workers’ clubs and at the Winter Palace, and the nighttime light show created by numerous boats on the Neva River swaying search lights and shooting off illumination rockets and gun salutes.6 The lack of a core to their festivities shows that the first Bolshevik holiday was relatively relaxed. The festivities could not and did not have to fall in line with a prescribed set of organizational instructions. Thus, the stylistic elements that characterized these festivities were eclectic. They freely...

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