Peter Hitchens

The last Noël in the USSR

[Illustration: Jane Webster]

It was on Christmas morning in Moscow in 1990 that my daughter, then aged seven, realised that Santa Claus was not to be trusted. She had made the usual elaborate suggestions to him in a letter to Lapland (perhaps hoping that, being posted from a frozen region, it would get through more readily). But when she came to rip open her gifts, the parcels did not contain the things she had hoped for. Instead, they were full of pale, oddly coloured and sometimes faintly dangerous Soviet products, breathing the last enchantments of the 1930s. Mrs Hitchens had queued fiercely to buy these delights in the colossal ‘Children’s World’ department store which stood just across the road from KGB headquarters. Christmas in the Evil Empire was different, you see, though not always worse.

By the time we went to live there, at the end of the Gorbachev era, the festival was no longer actually banned in Soviet Moscow. Young Pioneers no longer patrolled the wintry streets searching for subversive Christmas trees, as they had done in the early years of the Leninist state. The air no longer trembled with the sound of cathedrals being dynamited, or of great bells being torn from their towers and spitefully smashed, as it had done in Stalin’s day. There were even attempts to restore some of the many Orthodox churches and monasteries desecrated and befouled by use as warehouses or reformatories.

The League of the Militant Godless, once a huge semi-official organisation dedicated to mockery and hatred of God, of priests and believers, had quietly vanished during the war against Hitler. God had, during that odd period, proved a useful Comrade, at least as long as the war went on. He had been exiled and cancelled again since, but not with quite the same scorn as before.

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