Public and Private Family Celebration Events as Reflected in the Soviet Press

Abstract

In the history of Lithuania, the Soviet period stands out as an era that changed the natural development of ethnic culture. For the first time in our country, an attempt was made to replace the traditional religious calendar and holidays of the human life cycle with new holidays and new socialist traditions and rituals. It was hoped that the new rites would replace the older religious rites, and that communist morality and socialist internationalism would defeat bourgeois nationalism.
The creation of socialist festivals and holidays was one of the most important ideological goals of the USSR, and no effort was spared for its implementation. Throughout the Soviet period, the concept of ‘new traditions’, which sought to legitimise newly created holiday rituals, was actively developed. The family was necessary for the meaningfulness of tradition as a value category, and the mass media, among which the periodical press occupied a leading role throughout the Soviet period, were necessary for its dissemination. As it had no analogues in Lithuania before, this cultural process of the pursuit of forming new, Soviet festivals and holidays by rejecting their religious aspect is important for ethnologists in order to understand the dynamics of holiday formation in crisis situations.
The object of this article is the description of celebrations or leisure events referred to as celebrations, which are repeated or planned to be repeated annually and are in any way connected with the family, as they are reflected in the Soviet press. The aim of the article is to analyse the family holidays as described in the periodical press and classify them according to certain criteria – the place and the nature of the celebration. To achieve this goal, I set the following tasks: (1) to delve into the definition of a holiday/ritual, (2) to analyse publications about events called family holidays in the private sphere, (3) to analyse publications about public events called family holidays, and (4) to reveal the ritual specificity of these events.
Analysis of Soviet periodicals has shown that many events organised at that time and dedicated to the family were aimed at being called ‘festivals’, giving them a fixed time and continuity, the value and the power of tradition. It was understood that the celebration was important from an ideological perspective. However, time has shown that a holiday is not possible without a ritual performed in it, which is important in the emotional sense and has a psychological impact on those participating in it.
If in the 1960s there was a call to create a holiday celebrated in the family, in a private space, in the parents’ house, most likely in order to distract people from celebrating Christmas or Mother’s Day, then in the 1970s and the 1980s, the so-called ‘traditional festivities’ celebrated outside the family, in the public space, already dominated and were often called not a celebration of just one family, but of several or many families; sometimes they were referred to as ‘an evening party’ (vakaronė), ‘an outdoor party’ (gegužinė), or a sports holiday. Family celebrations were usually held in a public space: in a culture house or a factory hall. Not only family members but also work colleagues participated, with professional actors, musical groups, doctors, lawyers, and specialists in other fields invited to such events. Sometimes, in order to ensure a festive mood, schoolchildren or even kindergartners were invited to perform at concerts. Even ordinary and anniversary weddings and baby naming ceremonies held in the halls of registry offices became occasions for mass celebrations.
The aim of these festivities was to ‘distract’ people from religious holidays, such as Christmas Eve, Easter, or Mother’s Day, which brought families and relatives together. However, this aim remained generally unfulfilled, because even in a secularised society, the traditional family rituals of Christmas Eve, Christmas, and Easter prevailed, while the socialist tradition that was attempted to be established along with the new celebrations did not materialise, just as public events for families promoted in the press did not acquire the scale of universally celebrated festivals or holidays. Even when shrouded in the veil of tradition as a value category, ideologised entertainment/leisure events, which especially intensified at the sunset of the Soviet era, did not form the ritual characteristics, feelings, and power of the new festivity. The variety of events advertised in the press pointed to unsuccessful efforts to create new festivities that were to be celebrated by families at home and with the family in the public space.