Do actors dressed as Vladimir Lenin damage the image of the leader? What should a Soviet carnival be like? How can the religious festival of the Holy Trinity become secular?
Such questions were asked by the directors and scriptwriters of mass Soviet celebrations who, year after year, were preparing to mark the anniversary of the October Revolution in 1967.
This book is the story of mass Soviet celebrations and the people who wished to make them the refuge of the Soviet dream. The author describes in detail the subjects, compositions and heroic plans of these mass performances, demonstrating that the Soviet holiday was not simply a product of propaganda but a semantic aggregator of the Soviet picture of the world. The book explores the history of the people and ideas of the Thaw period and their efforts to create within the Soviet holiday a space of new, post-Stalinist communication.
