Tag Archives: New Year

Last Year’s Snow Was Falling – Soviet New Year Animation, 1983

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A small New Year present to our readers, first published on our Telegram channel Beorn And The Shieldmaiden yesterday! ☃️

No New Year is complete without this plasticine animated film from 1983, directed by Alexander Tatarsky and voice acting by Stanislav Sadalsky.

The film plays on many Russian folk tales, but with unexpected twists. It reached a cult status after its first appearance on Central TV. The aphoristic remarks of the characters, full of absurd humour, turned into colloquial proverbs.

Happy New Year from the USSR! Postcards of the Bygone Era

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With the New Year coming up, it is time to look hopefully into the coming year and to send someone you love a post card with the best wishes. For me, few modern cards come close to the personality and warmth eminating from the vintage cards. In my family’s archive there are a number of such cards, that were collected by my grandparents from the time even before my mother was born.

Inspired by the article 15 nostalgic Soviet New Year postcards in Russia Beyond the Headlines and by a Telegram post showing how “In the city of Sovetsky, bus stops were decorated with drawings from old Soviet postcards.”, I started scanning this festive part of the collection.

Each postcard is represented with both the face and reverse sides, in the original, aged, paper colour and with the white balance restored (see the links under each picture for the additional versions). The cards are indexed by the year they were approved from printing, meaning that they were used to congratulate people with the next, coming, year.

1952-1953

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New Year of Peter I and the Roots of Grandfather Frost and Snow Maiden – Their True History

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Some years ago I published an article about the instruction of the Western calendar in Russia by Peter I and the abolishment of the ancient Slavic calendar, counting over 7500 years of history.

While that article is true in all respects, as it is usual with our history, there are even more layers of alterations as one starts delving deeper into a topic. This is also so with the Russian calendar, and the tradition of New year celebration. For those who have not read it, I strongly advise you to read the previous article before continuing with the materials below. There I touch upon the linguistic aspects and two different words for “year” in Russian – “leto” (meaning both “year” and “summer”) and “god” (meaning “year”, with the overt reference to the Dutch word for “God”). In fact the first of the four articles below carries an explanation for why years were counted in summers…

The materials below are comprised of translations of four articles, originally published in “Argumenty i Fakty”, and uncover more details around Peter I reform, then going to the origins of the characters of “(Grand)father Frost” and the “Snow Maiden”. The articles can be read independently, but for a better understanding I would recommend reading them all in order.

Contents:

  1. The Tzar and the Tree. Why Peter I moved New year to January the 1st
  2. Bonfires for the ancestors and the gifts to the terrifying Grandfather. How New Year was celebrated in Russia
  3. Snow-mai-den! The history of the Russian character, which has no analogues
  4. According to Old Style. Why did the New year made do without a Tree

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