Mass Media Overview
Grandfather Frost pushes Father Christmas out of the Russian limelight
17.04.2007 09:18
www.telegraph.co.uk/
By Adrian Blomfield/ 30/12/2005
Russia's equivalent of Father Christmas has become the centre of a New Year industry worth hundreds of millions of pounds.
Tomorrow night, Ded Moroz, or Grandfather Frost, will act as compere at hundreds of Russian New Year's Eve parties.
At one shindig, rumoured to be costing 300,000 pounds, he will be descending from a helicopter laden with trinkets from Tiffany's in his sack. Alarmed that Russians were embracing all things Western - including Christmas - after the fall of communism, the Kremlin launched a concerted campaign to bring Ded Moroz back from the verge of obscurity.
He was given back his magical staff, his flowing red coat and his assistant, the snow maiden Snegurochka, a Stalinist invention of the 1930s, and sent out on to the streets.
Three years ago, despite widespread protests that he lived in the North Pole, the government installed an official Ded Moroz in the remote town of Veliky Ustyug, north of St. Petersburg. This year he acquired a winter residence in Moscow.
A government committee is writing his official biography, which claims he has been part of Russian myth for 1,000 years, rather than a 19th century import from Germany.
The historical revisionism seems to be working. Santa Claus has been eclipsed, with just six per cent of Russians celebrating Christmas Day, down from a high of 19 per cent two years ago.
The Russian Church is unhappy too. Orthodox Christmas, commemorated on Jan 7, remains very much in the shadow of New Year's Day.