Festivals of Collusion? Provincial Days in the 1930s

During the first Five-Year Plan, collectivization, and the cultural revolution in the Soviet Union, an aspiration to "totalism" took hold among policy makers, sloganizers, and cultural managers. Devices such as "One-Hundred Percent Collectivization" and "One-Hundred Percent Attendance [at festivals]" were printed and shouted everywhere. This surge to wholeness, a kind of surreal moment in the history of "integralism" that was sweeping Europe in the early 1930s, was reflected in a whole array of practices. Two are relevant here: the cooptation of the revolutionary festival of the first Soviet years (which had originally been designed for pious commemoration) for use in virtually any kind of "campaign" of the moment; and the resultant multiplication of local festivals at such frequency as to be likened by Malte Rolf to the early modern European "world of permanent festival." Both these concurrent policies naturally devalued the festival as originally conceived in terms of whatever sacrality it might have possessed in the great Petrograd and Moscow open-air shows of 1918–20.

Ordered from above, local authorities sought the replication of "national" themes for current social and political campaigns in their own locales, which in this case included Orel, Kursk, Tambov, and Voronezh, the component parts of the Central Black Earth Region. The transparently manipulative and opportunistic use of such public displays clearly reduced their potential for inducing devotion and reverence among the participants. In brief, it was harder to get a historico-moralistic lump in one's throat for "The Day of the Professions" than it was for, say, "The Storming of the Winter Palace" (1920) – quite aside from the fact that the latter was historically mendacious. But it also seems apparent, at least as I read between the lines, that local organizers were ready to take on more and more local celebrations – in spite of the huge expenditure of time and money (and the risk of a flop).

This striking fact invites at least some speculation. The research of Chris Chulos of Helsinki University, first in his dissertation on 19th-century peasant religious life in Voronezh Province, and now in his current project on Russian pilgrimage and festivals, clearly reveals that local populations sought not only to mount copycat attempts to parallel the great moments of imperial-national jubilees and other commemorative observances, but also to invent their own locally oriented civic and religious holidays.¹ Local patriotism, however fettered by the Soviet mechanisms of party and state, surely remained a much more powerful impulse even in the grim years in question than historians have yet been able to unearth in their ongoing investigations. For local organizers, the balance sheet in making such decisions included the investment and risk alluded to above as measured against the elements of legitimacy they might hope to win in offering up a demonstration of local pride, while still serving the purposes of the regime.

The Soviet festival was from the beginning a dual system of politics and fun. In the period here meticulously documented, politics, or the official purpose of the festivals, clearly consisted in winning people away from religious rites and calendric rhythms, concurrently modifying their notion of time; and by means of verbal, visual, and theatrical performances winning their loyalty and focusing their attention on the current festival theme. Rolf argues, correctly it seems to me, that although the anti-religious goal was not achieved, at least in this period (1928–32), major shifts in popular festival habits were well underway. The author's findings on local schoolchildren's festival preferences, based upon polls, help remind us that visualizing events such as festivals is essential to understanding them. That the children surveyed apparently liked the civic festivals better than the church ones is not surprising, because the former was the only all-city, community, public festival in town. Religious celebrations persisted but were necessarily confined to the home or to very small gatherings. Some all-village religious festivals doubtless took place in remote places, but in an archipelago, with each far removed from the other. One of the great attractions of a festival – aside from the entertainment – is the...