History of Santa Claus in Soviet Russia from exile to return
of New Year’s eve celebrations showing happy workers dancing and drinking to the health of Stalin painted the picture of a more prosperous era. But in reality, life did not improve for the majority of the population. Such footage was part of the state propaganda machine that tried to present the Soviet Union as a “superior system” to the capitalist West that was in the grip of economic depression, says Petrone.
wrote that at gatherings with children, Ded Moroz ‘customarily ends his talk with the question “to whom do we owe all the good things in socialist society?” to which it is said the children chorus reply “Stalin.”’ In the 1960s, at the height of the space race between the Soviet Union and U.S., Ded Moroz appeared in flying rockets on cards and posters, some with the caption: “Ded Moroz is seriously ready for the space flight.
As communism began to fall across Europe in 1989, Ded Moroz fell out of favor in some satellite states in eastern Europe, where the Russian gift-giver had been exported. Countries such as Bulgaria and Romania restored their original versions of Santa Claus as they returned to their old customs. When Western cultural influence began to seep into the new capitalist Russia in the 1990s and with it, Coca Cola billboards featuring a beaming Western Santa and ornaments of the tubby man in store fronts, Ded Moroz decided to get into business. In 1998, then Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov and local authorities marketed Veliky Ustyug, a small town surrounded by pine forest in the northern region of Vologda, as the home of Ded Moroz and built him a 12-room wooden palace.
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