Soviet Santa
atlasobscura.com
atlasobscura.com
Add to this the fact that in the 70s and likely later, people were still migrating from rural villages to the cities, with the whole baggage of inherited religiosity and mishmash of folk beliefs. My grandmother put in plenty of time in prayer each day. Icons or whole arrangements of them are a feature in many homes, cars and sometimes, more rarely, offices. And I still receive messages from my parents each year, commemorating birth and then the resurrection of Christ. Folk culture doesn't tend to follow an official doctrine, as exemplified by troves of Soviet jokes—and is also not big on ideological clarity, so many didn't see a problem in subscribing to both socialism and Christianity, along with crystal healing, magical powers of thought and a bouquet of other fringe beliefs.
In the 90s, my home city already had a bunch of churches including at least one large temple, and one or two monasteries—and I don't think they popped up recently.
Notably also, even Bolsheviks preserved old and unassuming Karelian wooden churches, recognizing them as architectural and cultural monuments—while demolishing some huge temples in Moscow. Like the Kondopoga church, built in 1774 and which somebody burned down in August of 2018: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Church_of_the_Do...
For this reason, I doubt religion will ever die. It will be with us always.
Afaik neuroscience also can induce ‘divine’ experience by applying current in a proper place.
I'm not saying it's for everybody, or that everybody should follow one flavor of religion. But it's definitely wrong to look down upon those who choose to be religious, as there are several advantages (in the here and now).
Here's a Harvard paper and another, for good measure. The internet is chock full of papers like these.
https://www.nami.org/Blogs/NAMI-Blog/December-2016/The-Menta...
It's at least a bit of the tragedy of the commons. Religious people feel and live better but make others feel worse and have more stressful lives.
Of course this is a very subjective opinion, but I have witnessed enough examples where this is true.
There are some doctrines in Buddhism and the writings of Carl Sagan that make me feel that.
The pronunciation is close to “dee-yet mah-ross”
(Although we did celebrate christmas since the anti-religion clampdown wasn't that aggressive in Yugoslavia.)
click the speaker
New Year was still wayyy bigger deal.
There was an article in the RSFSR Felony codex ("breaking the laws of separation of the church from the state, and of the school from the church", #142) the sole purpose of which was to outlaw religious congregations.
Many baptists (mostly Ukrainian) were imprisoned indefinitely - well into eighties - for refusing to obtain passports.
Finally the idea of "legality" of something for which you get persecuted and mocked by state and party officials (as part of their line of duty), and get auto-fired from a significant part of the economy in a state with no (legal) private economy seems a little twisted.
It was imported due to the soviet occupation after WWII and the subsequent adoption of communism. The word Christmas was censored in 1948. In the 80s our beloved supreme leader wanted to associate those presents with the state instead of Moș Gerilă, so things got a little weird with the state propaganda.
After the revolution in 1989 we changed the holiday to the Christmas in the Gregorian calendar and Santa Claus, translated as "Moș Crăciun" (Father Christmas).
[1] https://cb-rzhev.blogspot.com/2013/11/blog-post_4347.html
No, 'Santa Slaus' is a distortion of st. nicholas, to which people may or may not have ascribed characteristics of previous 'wintertime characters', as attested to by the further examples of: Sinterklaas, Mikulás, which are both actually not distinct entities, but both 'St Nicholas' in their respective languages. One can make some anthropological case that these are 'manifestations', but in the case of 'Santa Klaus', the core 'identity' is still a 'nicholas figure' to which people may or may not have ascribed other attributes. Lineage and conceptual transactions are important here, esp. since this makes a less appealing narrative to spin, when one is trying to downplay the second-ranked feast day in the official state religion of an empire that viewed itself as the direct and legitimate successor of imperial christian rome.
e.g:
"It wasn’t really a festival exactly, but more of a somber religious holiday marked by fasting and long church services in Old Church Slavonic"
This is what feast days (aka 'festivals') are in orthodoxy. Followed by a 'feast'. So yes, it was a festival, "exactly".
Christmas was a major day of important significance in imperial russia, and Fr. Frost was directly promoted as a secular replacement for St. Nicholas, because soviet-style communists are militantly athiest and hostilly anti-religion. The very fact that this figure exists is a testimonial to the need to provide a 'foil' for the people to accept his removal, rather than just some casual 'cultural shift' to a different 'winter character manifestation'.
As for people 'forgetting how to celebrate christmas' during soviet times, please recall (whether positively or negatively) that Mr. Putin's mother had him baptized in secret from his communist father and he makes pilgrimages to monasteries regularly. The current high place of the church in russian society did not just originate in some ideological vaccum, many never gave up in the face of overt and militant religious hostility.
Let's put alone that in 89 it was USSR so Russia, Ukraine, Belorussia, etc. all together.
In any case there were no Russian troops stationed in Poland. Quite opposite, Poland and its army was one of leading members of Warsaw Pact (the name, sic!).
So what does "occupation" mean in your statement?
Wheter it was occupation or not is debatable.
Not all protests, uprisings and revolutions are good. Look at their class character and composition.
b) As for 'facism': show me the 'facism' in the key documents:
HU: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demands_of_Hungarian_Revolutio...
CS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism_with_a_human_face
(yes, wikipedia scholarship, better sources welcome)
while I have no doubt that facists would piggy-back on to any anti-communist movement to seize a moment of opportunity, framing either of these as 'facist' at their core is at best poor analysis. Even hard-core bolsheviks would differentiate betwean 'bourgeois-democratic reactionaries' and 'facists' since being clear in distinction is necessary for proper argument/strategy.
Apparently as witnessed by downvoting, some don't like anyone to acknowledge this fact.
Also, please don't take HN threads into religious or ideological flamewar. Your comment doesn't exactly go there but it's a step in that direction, and we're trying to avoid that on this site.
Sure, if the Germans give it back to [the original Prussians](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Prussians), it would only be fair.
Nor any other day on HN.
I said "all" as a way of addressing every commenter who was posting in this spirit—not just you. Your comment wasn't so bad, since you were simply describing your experience and your feelings. But it's the root of exactly the sort of flamewar we don't want on HN. The internet can't handle arguing about this kind of thing without losing its mind.
One time many years ago, as a much younger man, I received a parking fine for parking too long in a time-limited spot outside my home, having not bothered to organise a residents' permit.
Irate, I took it "all the way to city hall" to contest the fine on the grounds of injustice and superfluousness.
On meeting the municipal officials in the arbitration room, I protested "I don't understand why you need to issue tickets in that street; there's always plenty of parking available".
They looked back at me as the naive young fool that I was and explained: "Do you know why there's always parking available for you? It's because we enforce the rules."
Duly chastened, I paid the fine, got a permit, and received no further penalties.
And for the subsequent three years I lived at that house, there continued to be plenty of parking available.