Grandfather Frost

Christmas trees were still under drastic Bolshevik ban as Christmas 1935 came to Russia, but just before New Year's Day the Kremlin's policy slued completely around. Excitedly the word flew: "Trees are O. K!" Perspiring peasants furiously chopped, hustled trees to Moscow, where the big Soviet trusts. Government office buildings and communal apartments flooded their courtyards, stuck up a tree in the centre of each, invited one & all in for joyous skating. Exuberant citizens cut stars out of tin cans and hastily rigged up costumes for Grandfather Frost & the Snow Maiden, traditional bringers of presents.

The late, great Nikolai Lenin plastered all Russia with Karl Marx's slogan, "Religion is opium for the people," but Dictator Lenin's household celebrated with a tree every year, Bolshevism or no Bolshevism. Only under Dictator Stalin were Christmas trees in Russia made socially tabu. Last week the lid was off. Savants of Bolshevism gamboled at the Lenin Institute, where the features of their Grandfather Frost were those of Bolshevism's great pioneer in blazing new Arctic routes, Professor Otto Schmidt (TIME, Feb. 26, 1934 et seq.).

Twenty-two Christmas trees twinkled in Gorky Park, and on six great rinks ice skaters disported themselves beneath banners carrying the new slogan of Joseph Stalin, "Life becomes better! Life becomes happier!"

Meanwhile Soviet news organs also slued completely around to inform Moscovites that persons who oppose Christmas trees are no longer the virtuous Old Bolsheviks and the stern Heroes of the Revolution they were fortnight ago, but are now despicable "Leftwing oppositionists."

To make things mentally easy for even the dullest, the official organ of Communist Youth, the Komsomolskaya Pravda, carried an arresting account of doings on New Year's Eve in one of Moscow's district locals of the Young Communists. Just as Grandfather Frost began handing out presents to Red moppets, a Red youth interrupted the festivities by shouting, "Stop! Comrades, you are making a terrible ideological mistake. Trees in the Communist society are meant for such serious use as the building of homes for the proletariat. Comrades, I order you to go home! Otherwise the whole meaning of our Revolution must sink into a morass of opportunism. Comrades! And you 'Grandfather Frost,' if you do not go home I shall denounce you to the Party Secretary of our Komsomol headquarters."

At this threat some of the moppets began to cry but Grandfather Frost, whipping off his whiskers, roared at the zealous Communist youth. "Shut up, you fool! I am the Party Secretary!"

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