Do you know that the symbols of the Soviet New Year - Ded Moroz and Snegurochka - used to be serial killers? And that they appeared in 1937, in the midst of the Great Purges? If not, read our little investigation.
In East Slavic mythology Moroz was a dangerous creature. He personified winter: a warmly dressed elderly man with a long white beard. He had a difficult character - if he was in a bad mood, he sent icy winds and snowstorms on people, took naughty children to the forest and fed them to hungry wolves.
Snegurochka was no better. She was also a symbol of winter and death. According to the original fairytale (thanks to Vladimir Propp!), one winter day a girl named Snegurochka went with her friends to the forest. Snegurochka's friends envied her beauty and killed her. Snegurochka became a snow zombie and revenged her killers: they were eaten by wild animals. (The Brothers Grimm would appreciate!)
In 1881 Rimskii-Korsakov fixed images of these coldblooded killers in his opera, but the October revolution doomed them to be forgotten. For a long time celebration of the New Year was prohibited in the Soviet Union. However, some New Year traditions were revived following the famous letter by a Kiev functionary Pavel Postyshev, published in Pravda on December 28, 1935. In this open letter Postyshev called to return the Christmas tree. See the full text in the attachment.
In 1935, Stalin allowed celebration of the New Year, which was a part of his lager campaign for exploitation of the imperial past. Soviet Ded Moroz and Snegurochka remerged in their current capacity at the Christmas tree celebration in the Moscow House of the Unions in 1937. Since then, these natural born killers have been the most wanted guests in each Soviet apartment!