Table of contents:
Video: They were preparing for the New Year in the USSR in the summer. Photo collection
2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55
Although the main elements of a home holiday have survived from Soviet times, in those days, preparing for the New Year in the traditional form was almost heroic, and many now recall that painstaking work with nostalgia.
Preparations for the New Year in the USSR long before its onset: due to the fact that it was difficult to get food, everything you need was bought in several months and carefully stored until the right moment. Now it is difficult to imagine this, but in order to get the main ingredients, for example, Olivier salad, one had to try hard: there was no mayonnaise, green peas, sausages on the free market - they began to stock up from October. It was with great difficulty that the main drink of the holiday, Soviet champagne, was also obtained.
We invite you to remember in a nostalgic compilation how it was.
At first, New Year was not an official public holiday, but most families traditionally celebrated it along with Christmas, and the holiday was considered a family holiday.
Christmas trees and Christmas tree decorations in the USSR
For the first time, the New Year was officially celebrated only at the end of 1936, after an article by a prominent Soviet figure Pavel Postyshev in the Pravda newspaper.
“Why do we have schools, orphanages, nurseries, children's clubs, palaces of pioneers depriving the children of the working people of the Soviet country of this wonderful pleasure? Some, not otherwise than "left" benders denounced this children's entertainment as a bourgeois venture. Follow this misjudgment of the tree, which is great fun for children, to end. Komsomol members, pioneer workers should arrange collective Christmas trees for children on New Year's Eve. In schools, orphanages, in pioneer palaces, in children's clubs, in children's cinemas and theaters - there should be a Christmas tree everywhere! City councils, chairmen of district executive committees, village councils, and public education authorities should help arrange a Soviet Christmas tree for the children of our great socialist homeland."
The state allowed to celebrate the New Year, however, January 1 remained a working day. The Kremlin tree is the main tree of the entire Union, 1938.
Column Hall of the House of Unions, 1941.
A group of scouts of the Western Front greets the New Year 1942.
Santa Claus goes to the skating rink of Gorky Park
New Year's performance in the early 1950s.
Photographer Emmanuil Evzerikhin captured his family at the Christmas tree, 1954
1955. Vocational school students came to the Kremlin New Year's holiday in national costumes. Even the stairs are packed tightly, 1955.
1960 Costumes and Christmas tree decorations reflected the power of the country: divers and cosmonauts at the Kremlin Christmas tree. The first satellite has already been in orbit, and the film "Amphibian Man" has not yet been filmed.
The crew of the Tu-144 before the flight Moscow-Alma-Ata, 1978.
Santa Claus in Dynamo Kiev. He tries to protect the basket from the throw of the world champion A. Belostenny, 1983.
Omsk region. Santa Claus is in a hurry to celebrate in 1988.
Tickets for the New Year's tree for children were also difficult to get. And you also need a gauze snowflake costume or a bunny outfit. The trade union committee provided the parents with the gift, which included caramels, apples, and walnuts. The dream of every child was to get to the main Christmas tree of the country - first to the Column Hall of the House of Unions, and after 1954 - to the Kremlin Christmas tree.
It was only after the war that the traditions of celebrating the New Year in the USSR began to really take shape. Christmas tree decorations began to appear: at first, very modest ones - made of paper, cotton wool and other materials, later - beautiful, bright ones, made of glass, similar to the decorations of pre-revolutionary Christmas trees. By the end of the 1960s, mass production of toys for the New Year tree was launched, and fairly simple plastic versions could be bought, usually with Soviet symbols.
Festive table
We were preparing for the holiday in advance. Firstly, you need to buy food - that is, "get it", stand in hourly lines, get sprats, caviar, smoked sausage in grocery orders.
Mandatory dishes on the festive table: Olivier, jellied meat, jellied fish, carrot and beetroot salads, herring under a fur coat, pickled cucumbers and tomatoes.
Those who had an acquaintance of a seller in a grocery store could afford brandy for 8 rubles 12 kopecks, champagne “Soviet” semi-sweet, tangerines for the New Year.
Ready-made cakes were also in short supply, so they mostly had to bake themselves.
Or stand in line for a long time, as in this photo.
Outfits and gifts
Every Soviet woman absolutely needed a new fashionable dress - it could be sewn with her own hands or in an atelier, in rare cases - bought from blacksmiths; the store was the last place to find something.
Film actress Klara Luchko at the Christmas tree, 1968.
New Year's gifts are another obstacle for Soviet citizens in the process of preparing for the New Year. There was tension with any goods in the country, and with beautiful goods it was even worse, so our parents went on a visit, grabbing champagne, sausage, preferably Cervelat, canned exotic fruits (pineapples), boxes of chocolates. Women were given Soviet perfumes for the holiday, which were in abundance in stores, and colognes were given to men.
"Nothing makes a woman more beautiful than hydrogen peroxide." - this joke becomes relevant on the eve of every New Year's celebration in the Soviet Union. Even the most fashionable women did not know the phrase "beauty salon" at that time. They signed up for hairdressing salons in a few weeks, preparing hairstyles, make-up and the entire "New Year's look" required from Soviet women maximum time, inventiveness and independence - sometimes friends did their hairstyles.
The last stage of preparation is to wipe (fix) the TV, which, according to the postman Pechkin, is "the best decoration on the New Year's table." "Carnival Night", "Irony of Fate", "New Year's Adventures of Masha and Viti", "Blue Light", "Morozko" - Soviet films, programs and cartoons in the morning, without which no Soviet citizen could imagine a festive night.
Recommended:
How the American Indians were sick and how were they treated?
It is not easy to survive in the prairies and forests of North America. Before the arrival of Europeans, local peoples did not know the flu, smallpox and chickenpox, but they faced bacterial infections, wounds and the need to help women in labor. So they had to develop their medicine, despite the fact that they did not have too many opportunities for this
Preparing for spring: 5 main rules for choosing and installing greenhouses in a summer cottage
With the approach of the summer cottage season, many amateur gardeners begin to think about organizing their site. After all, everyone wants to get the harvest as early as possible, regardless of weather conditions and time of year. A greenhouse will help to cope with these tasks in the best possible way, the design of which will protect the plants from the harmful effects of atmospheric phenomena, while at the same time it will significantly increase the yield. But for this you need to know some rules and nuances, without which its effectiveness will be zero
How in the USSR in the 1960s, the authorities were preparing for a meeting with aliens
In 1963, the ballet The Distant Planet was staged in Leningrad. It told about the journey of earthlings to another planet and about its conquest. A little later, the official opinion of the censors about the ballet appeared. It condemned the consumer attitude towards aliens
They themselves were looking for a "damn particle", and everyone was told that they were looking for a "particle of God"
Among the Jews, traditionally everything "black" is "white", and "white" is "black", both in religion and in physics, the science of nature! Christ, having come, called them Gd - the devil. The particle that the Jews were looking for with the help of the collider, they also called the "particle of God", and they themselves were looking for the "damn particle"
A year without pants - a year of miracles and new impressions
A year ago, I threw away my last pants. I just want to share with you my discoveries this year. I decided to switch to skirts two years ago. During pregnancy, I tried to wear tunics and dresses. And gradually I just stopped buying myself jeans and pants