Replacing Halloween – Putin’s pumpkin panic

If you’re hoping to celebrate Halloween this October 31, you’d better make sure you don’t happen to be in Russia at the time: some there would like to have you arrested for spreading “Western Satanism” if you did.

Vitaly Milonov is a notoriously outspoken self-styled “demon-hunter“ and member of the Russian Parliament, or Duma, for President Vladimir Putin’s United Russia Party, who presents himself as being far more Orthodox than the Russian Orthodox Church itself is. Last October, in his capacity as Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Committee on Family, Women and Children, Milonov suggested subjecting any Russian found wearing a Halloween costume to drugs and alcohol checks, and even compulsory police-administered “gay-tests”, whatever they may be.

The festival being a modern 1990s import into Russia from the West, Milonov viewed it as a source of foreign infection, fit only for “perverts and degenerates”. He declared its celebration by public institutions like schools to breach federal law, advising good patriots to instead line up pumpkins decorated with the faces of Presidents Biden and Zelensky before shooting them in the head.

Actually, Halloween is not (yet) illegal across Russia, but that does seem to be the way things are currently headed. Another Russian MP, Yaroslav Nilov, has suggested the minor remedy of simply renaming it the “Day of Scary Tales and Stories”, but a far more popular solution has been to rebrand it as an alternative “traditional” Orthodox Christian event – the Pumpkin Feast of the Saviour (i.e., Jesus Christ). The only problem being that this “age-old” Christian festival never actually existed …

Feast of fools

The Russian anthropologist Alexandra Arkhipova (recognised as a “foreign agent” by the Kremlin, perhaps because of her gross pumpkin-heresy), has demonstrated that, as recently as 2013, there were precisely zero references to the Pumpkin Feast in Russian State media; a decade later, by 2023, no fewer than 867 separate media outlets had mentioned the thing by name.   

This is not very surprising, as Arkhipova says the very idea of the Pumpkin Feast was invented purely as a joke around 2014-16, intended to satirise the way Putin’s government and its allies in the Orthodox Church had been increasingly exorcising all Western influence from the nation as a corrupting force, following the annexation of Crimea; the Russian Academy of Education recently concluded Halloween was a harmful manifestation of “Anglo-Saxon pseudo-culture”, for example.

Compliant newspapers informed their readers that the Pumpkin Feast was quite different, however: “Unlike the gloomy Halloween, where the main attributes are blood, ghouls, evil spirits, Pumpkin [Feast] is a kind, bright, positive day and, most importantly, close to our [native Russian] spirit and culture."

There are three genuine Harvest Festival-type Orthodox feast days in Russia, sometimes called the Apple, Nut and Honey Feasts of the Savior, and satirists joked that the Pumpkin Feast was obviously a forgotten one which would soon be drafted in by Putin to replace Halloween … before, with alarming rapidity, this same joke then became actual reality.

In Russia, pumpkins are often seen as an inherently native crop, which appear in the first Russian cookbooks of the late 1700s, making them ideal potential nationalist symbols. Unfortunately, however, they were actually foreign imports, brought in by Western European and Muslim traders in the 1500s.

Accordingly, a fake history of the pumpkin had to be invented to go alongside the fake holiday. Supposedly, Byzantine monks brought a colossal pumpkin to an Orthodox holy man called Saint Vladimir the Bright Sun in days of yore, ever since when pumpkins have been grown across Russia as a sacred national Christian fruit – an unlikely tale as, just like the Pumpkin Feast itself, Saint Vladimir the Bright Sun is himself a contemporary fake regime media creation too. 

 

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Hollow pumpkins

It seems the anti-Halloween propaganda is working amongst certain pro-Putin members of the public; last year, children attending a Halloween party in a shopping centre were attacked with pepper-spray and fake blood. But then, Halloween, being a recent 1990s arrival, has never really been all that popular in Russia anyway.

According to a 2023 survey, although 90 percent of respondents were aware of the holiday, only 3 percent said they planned to actually celebrate it; the most popular reason for not doing so, given by 67 percent, was that it was “a holiday of countries whose culture and traditions are different than ours”, whilst 7 percent called it “pagan”.

Halloween in Russia is really just a niche holiday for young people, much more than for adults or children, an excuse to go to nightclubs in costumes and get drunk. Why do the authorities object to it so much, then? Clubs and alcohol are helpful distractions to keep susceptible teens and twenty-somethings away from anti-government political activity.

In part, it is a moral scare. In 2014, Georgy Fedorov, a political activist, wrote to the then-Culture Minister, Vladimir Medinsky, demanding Halloween must be banned as it was a US-led plot intended to corrupt public morals, and make youngsters hanker after a dissolute Western lifestyle; spooky parties in nightclubs soon “degenerate into orgies”, and political revolution would follow hard upon the heels of any sexual one, he said. Natalia Makeeva, of the Russian Writers Union, agreed, calling Halloween a hidden tool of “civilisational confrontation”.

How so? In Russia, people have long memories of the “colour revolutions“, when crowds of ordinary people took to the streets in places like Ukraine to topple pro-Kremlin rulers. Crowds are thus considered a form of US, UK, EU or NATO-backed form of “political technology”, and crowds often form to celebrate Halloween: therefore, Halloween must be politically dangerous.

In 2019, Orthodox priests in Chelyabinsk issued a collective statement damning that year’s hit Hollywood movie Joker as encouraging “rebellion against the realities of bourgeois society” before revealing foreign-backed “political technologists” were planning to encourage local youths to dress up as Batman’s arch-nemesis, ostensibly for Halloween festivities, but actually as handy cover to “destabilise and destroy Russian statehood and corrupt Russians’ spiritual identity.” For similar reasons, public “Zombie Walks” have also been banned as vehicles for undead uprising.

Better the Devil you know

As events in Chelyabinsk imply, many Russian Orthodox clergymen definitely agree that Halloween is harmful. Archpriest Konstantin Kharitonov, for example, has claimed its celebration can cause “incurable diseases”, whilst Archbishop Luke of Zaporozhe has called for the State to intervene to “stop the horrible spread of anti-Orthodox pseudo-culture” which facilitates “a demonisation of children’s consciousness”, supposedly causing them to commit violence or suicide.

Handily, then, the Orthodox Church provides excellent religious cover for the Kremlin banning things it wants to ban anyway, i.e., unauthorised public gatherings of any kind. Given this, you would expect the Orthodox Church to be all in favour of Putin’s new, allegedly Christian-friendly, Pumpkin Feast of the Saviour – but you would be wrong.

As a fake, invented pseudo-holiday, many Orthodox clergy in fact view the act of celebrating the Pumpkin Feast to be just as sinful as that of “worshipping Satan” (as they see it) by celebrating Halloween.

Hieromonk Macarius, one of Russia’s most popular holy men, has admitted that “the laws of the State do not forbid such insane ignorance”, but noted that, likewise, there are no specific State laws against going to live in the forest and worship a giant wheel, either – but that does not make this an acceptably Christian thing to do. Anyone celebrating Putin’s fake “demonic feast”, therefore, is guilty of “outright idiocy”, Macarius has ruled.

Macarius is quite correct to be sceptical: Putin’s Pumpkin Feast of the Saviour ought to be treated as the trick it so clearly is.   


Will your kids be dressing up for Halloween? 


Steven Tucker is a UK-based writer with over ten books to his name. His latest, “Hitler’s and Stalin’s Misuse of Science”, comparing the woke pseudoscience of today to the totalitarian pseudoscience of the past, was released in 2023.

Image credit: Bigstock  


 

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