Unity Day (Russia)

• 1. Introduction

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  Unity Day, observed every the 4th of November, points to a moment in 1612 when Russia had neither a tsar nor a patriarch. Polish-Lithuanian forces occupied Moscow. The entire social order had given way. What held Russian statehood together, according to the holiday's logic, was a popular uprising from every class of society. When the holiday was reinstituted in 2005, only eight percent of Russians knew its name. What does it mean to build a national memory from scratch? And what happens when a political architect speaks openly about using a holiday to talk about empire without offending the world?

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• 2. Moscow Under Occupation

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  November 1612 marked the low point of what Russians call the Time of Troubles. Polish-Lithuanian forces had taken Moscow, and there was no effective central authority left in the Russian state. The crisis spread across politics, religion, and survival. What distinguished the uprising that ended the occupation was its breadth. People from every class of Russian society acted together without direction from above. The unity that preserved Russian statehood did not come from a tsar or a patriarch. It arose from the people themselves. The Russian Orthodox Church marks the 4th of November as the feast day of the icon of Our Lady of Kazan. That overlap gives the date both a civic and a sacred place within the Russian calendar. Tsar Mikhail Romanov, who secured power in the aftermath of the uprising, would build the first official holiday on that collective act.

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• 3. Three Hundred Years, Then Gone

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  In 1613, a formal observance was established to mark the liberation. Tsar Mikhail Romanov named it the Day of Moscow's Liberation from Polish Invaders. The Russian Empire observed that holiday for roughly three centuries. Then 1917 arrived, and the revolution that followed demanded a new calendar of commemorations. October Revolution Day took over the November slot. For the rest of the Soviet era, the 7th of November was the date that mattered most. The resurrection of the 1612 memory, carried across so many decades, would ultimately fall to a political moment Romanov could never have imagined.

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• 4. Designing the Holiday

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  Vladislav Surkov described his role in the holiday's creation with unusual candor. He recalled canceling 'the day of celebration of the socialist revolution' and introducing National Unity Day in its place. His rationale was openly strategic. There needed to be a way to speak about the Empire and Russia's desire to expand. But, as Surkov put it, this had to be done without offending 'the ears of the world community.' The new holiday, he stated, 'became the day of Russian nationalism in its essence.' Ecclesiastical backing came quickly. Patriarch Alexy II of Moscow publicly supported the initiative on the 29th of September 2004. He called 1612 a moment when Russians of different faiths and nationalities overcame both division and a formidable enemy. The result, he said, was stable civil peace. By early October, United Russia's Valery Bogomolov had also declared his support. On the 28th of October, eight thousand people gathered on Teatralnaya Square in Saratov. The rally was organized by the Public Chamber and Youth Parliament of the region. It included a formal address to President Putin in support of the new holiday. The bill reached the State Duma on the 23rd of November 2004. Its authors were Bogomolov and Oleg Yeremeev of United Russia, alongside Vladimir Zhirinovsky of the Liberal Democratic Party. The legislation abolished the 7th of November celebration and removed the 12th of December holiday for Constitution Day. It also extended the New Year holidays and installed the 4th of November as the new national day. On the 27th of December 2004, the Duma passed the bill in its third reading. Three hundred and twenty-seven deputies voted in favor. One hundred and four voted against, all of them communists. Two deputies abstained. The communists who voted against it were not the last to question what the new the 4th of November actually stood for.

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• 5. A Holiday Few Could Name

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  A poll conducted in 2007 found that twenty-three percent of Russians could correctly name the holiday. Progress over two years had been real but limited. Twenty-two percent of those surveyed identified the holiday as the Day of Accord and Reconciliation. That was the name the November 7th observance had carried in the 1990s. In public memory, the older name had outlasted the older holiday itself. Knowledge of the underlying historical event proved rarer still. In 2007, only four percent of respondents could identify the holiday as a commemoration of Moscow's liberation from Polish-Lithuanian invaders. In 2005, the figure for that same question had been five percent. Nearly one Russian in four, as of 2007, knew the holiday's name. The rest would encounter the date again the following November, and every November after that.

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