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Moscow Times
November 7, 2005.
Editorial
The Absurdity of November Holidays

The post-Soviet Kremlin enjoys tinkering with holidays. Boris Yeltsin created National Day on June 12 and Constitution Day on Dec. 12 and renamed the commemoration of the 1917 Revolution on Nov. 7 to Day of Accord and Reconciliation. Then last year, Vladimir Putin shortened the May holidays, extended the New Year's holidays and dumped Nov. 7 for People's Unity Day, the contentious new holiday that the country celebrated for the first time Friday.

The Kremlin says People's Unity Day commemorates the day in 1612 that Russians liberated Moscow from Polish occupation. Critics and historians call the holiday seriously flawed, not the least because it is being celebrated on the wrong day.

The Kremlin picked the date of Nov. 4, or Oct. 22 under the old Julian calendar, the day when Russian troops led by Prince Dmitry Pozharsky and Kuzma Minin are credited with seizing back Kitai-Gorod. The troops went on to drive False Dmitry out of the Kremlin on Oct. 26. But the Time of Troubles only ended in 1613, when the first Romanov assumed the throne.

That means People's Unity Day falls on the anniversary of a first victory in the struggle to take Moscow -- not the day Moscow was liberated. Also, historians and ordinary people alike remain at a loss over the significance of the 400-year-old event. But 1917 remains much more vivid in the public memory, and an independent survey last month found 63 percent of Russians opposed to abolishing the Nov. 7 holiday.

It remains to be seen whether People's Unity Day will ever be a reason for ordinary people to celebrate anything other than a day off. But the emergence of the holiday does beg a question: Will it be celebrated for years to come, or will it be abandoned if and when the political winds change, say as early as 2008?

What would happen if, for instance, former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov were to take the Kremlin? Would Kasyanov -- a liberal who lost his job after he sharply criticized the legal attack on Mikhail Khodorkovsky -- decide it was his turn to pick a holiday, perhaps to mark what he would no doubt describe as a return of democracy?

If so, he might delve into recent history and settle on Oct. 25, the day in 2003 that Khodorkovsky was arrested at gunpoint. Using the current Kremlin's fuzzy math, Oct. 25 could then be applied to the Julian calendar and -- voila -- the country would once again be celebrating a holiday on Nov. 7. Now that would be a holiday at least 63 percent of the public would support.