SUMMARY:

This article examines the history of the Russian holiday calendar from the imperial post-reform era to the early Soviet period. Svetlana Malycheva argues that contrary to the western European practice of negotiations between employers and their employees and strong traditions of urban culture, in the Russian Empire the major impetus toward modernization and universalization of the holiday calendar came from the top. Many different groups of the urban population responded to state attempts to universalize the official holiday calendar by lobbying for their confessional and social interests and, at the same time, by reforming traditional confessional and local patterns of rest to make them fit into a common empire-wide system of holidays. The official imperial holiday calendar was based on the Orthodox calendar and dynastic universalism. At the same time, it never became mandatory for all subjects of the Empire and dynamics of universalizing versus particularistic tendencies remained central in the process of reforming imperial urban life. In the late nineteenth century, the city itself became an important locus of horizontal dialogue between different groups of urban dwellers about their calendars of holidays and rest. The first part of the article deals with government laws regulating holiday calendars of the imperial subjects. The second part is a case-study of a region in central Russia. The author investigates negotiations of different groups of the urban population with government officials about their rights to observe local and religious holidays and days of rest. In conclusion, the author shows that the imperial dynamics of universalism and particularism survived into the early Soviet period and were reconsidered only in the early 1930s in the course of the anti-religious campaign.