Constructing a Soviet Time: Bolshevik Festivals and Their Rivals during the First Five-Year Plan. A Study of the Central Black Earth Region

In August and October of 1929 Central Committee decrees instituted two new all-union festivals: the Den' industrializatsii (Day of Industrialization) and the Den' urozhaia i kollektivizatsii (Day of Harvest and Collectivization). A considerable amount of funding and time was spent on planning and organizing these festivals, in a period when both were in short supply.¹ Obviously, the Bolsheviks saw no contradiction between an extensive promotion of celebrations and the goals of radical societal transformation during the first Five-Year Plan, as they not only matched the celebratory practices of early Soviet times but exceeded them.² What can be said of Moscow and Leningrad also holds true for the Central Black Earth Region, one of the large administrative units created in the late 1920s.³ Local organizers imitated the example and demands of the center by investing tremendous financial and intellectual resources in the creation and staging of mass festivals and celebrations of Soviet holidays.⁴ These efforts were of such a magnitude that the process of socio-economic transformation underway in the Russian periphery assumed the proportions of a "permanent festival."⁵

But the expansion of the Soviet festival cycle was only one aspect of the change that reorganized the annual calendar in 1929. As elements of the newly established "continuous workweek" and the "new Soviet calendar," festivals were part of a general effort to reshape the calendar and, more broadly, to reorganize time.⁶ The nepreryvka was designed to effect the organization of time in a manner suitable for the era that dawned with the drive toward a planned economy. The new "Soviet" calendar was supposed to bring about a break with the holiday culture of the NEP-period: not only did the calendar reform fix new, "revolutionary" festivals, it also removed church holidays from the canon of official days of celebration, to which they had still belonged in the 1920s. Religious holidays were now "normalized" in that they were downgraded to regular working days.⁷ The new calendar was constructed as purely "Soviet," a new order of time purged of all Sundays and other days of religious celebration.⁸

This article explores in depth the organization and implementation of festivals in the rural and urban areas of one important region, reviewing suggestive new evidence on popular attitudes towards them. It attempts to relate the oft-mentioned expansion of Soviet festivals in this period to the project of "Sovietizing" time by endowing it with new meaning and structure. Soviet festivals and their expansion appear in a new light when it is demonstrated that the goal of a Sovietized holiday calendar during the first Five-Year Plan was to monopolize the interpretation of time. In many ways, the Soviet celebration calendar was from the outset a "counter-calendar," one that had to compete with the Orthodox Church's traditional measurement of time.⁹ The "red calendar," the "Soviet ordering of time," aimed from its inception to break up traditional social bonds, and to integrate people into the new order by replacing them with Soviet bonds and traditions.¹⁰ But the conflict between calendar styles sharpened further in the clash of traditional and Soviet cultural models that took place during the second Cultural Revolution after 1929.¹¹ The aggressive offensive on the "religious front," the expanding crusade against "survivals of religious prejudices," and the goal of a "complete secularization" of society in those years radicalized the conflict with the religious tradition of festivals and holidays that had remained vibrant throughout the NEP period. Soviet days of celebration now were expected not only to alter but to replace their rivals in defining time.

However, this article also tries to go beyond the intentions of the organizers and experts of Soviet festivals by focusing on the forms and processes of accepting officially promoted festive culture. Soviet cultural activists in the 1920s had failed in establishing "red" rites de passage just as much as they had not been able to significantly reduce religious practices.¹² It...