A worker removes snow in Red Square near St. Basil's Cathedral and the mausoleum of Soviet state founder Vladimir Lenin.
Canned peas and a turgid address from a bespeckled Communist Party chief signalled the start of the New Year holiday during Anya Von Bremzen's Moscow childhood. She's wistful when she remembers those days in the USSR.
"These are very fond memories," says the author of Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing. "You sat in front of the television, the clock would strike twelve, and then dear Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev would come on and deliver his incomprehensible New Year's address, which always began 'Dear Compatriots.'"
And then the real festivities began: a concert, a taste of Sovetskoye-brand champagne, a trip to Red Square.
Christmas had been banned by the Bolsheviks in the early 1920s because of its religious associations and Old World imagery. But the Soviets transplanted the traditional holiday to New Year's Day and substituted Grandfather Frost or Ded Moroz for Santa Claus, a figure Bremzen remembers as "a winter magician in a long flowing robe."
"My favorite was his sidekick, a beautiful maiden called Snegurochka," Bremzen says. "I really wanted to have braids like the snow maiden."
Ded Moroz visited Soviet children with a bag of presents. That meant, according to Bremzen, unemployed or underemployed actors would make some money, and of course get "absolutely drunk."
"One of my most vivid memories is of Ded Moroz coming into our apartment and just falling flat on his face," she remembers. "I found him the next morning, you know, with a beard dislodged, snoring and I think that's when I stopped believing in miracles."
Bremzen says a Soviet parent's worst fear in those days was that Ded Moroz would confuse the gifts purchased for different families.
"So instead of an expensive toy train set, they would give you a cheap beach ball," she recalls.
Bremzen and her mother emigrated from Moscow to the United States 1974. She's especially nostalgic when she recalls her last New Year's Eve in Red Square, the year before her departure.
"My grandmother came in, and she stood in line for a long time to bring us a present, which was china imported from socialist Czechoslovakia. And she fell and broke all the china. So I remember the rattled china, I remember getting tipsy — I was 10 years old and I had my first taste of Sovetskoye-brand champagne for the first time in my life. And I went to the Red Square and it was a magical moment," she remembers. "The snow started falling, my grandmother who was a really fun grandma was singing, my parents were kissing and this was our last new year in the Soviet Union."