Online exhibition "New Year’s Masquerade"

The Museum of Moscow presents a new online exhibition "New Year’s Masquerade". On the website of the Museum Moscow Online project, you can learn the history of New Year’s masquerades in Russia and see festive Soviet masks made of cardboard.

The fashion to put on papier-mache masks for New Year’s celebrations was introduced in the 18th century by Empress Anna Ioannovna. The golden age of Christmas masquerades came in the middle of the next century. Along with adults, children’s masquerades began to appear: girls dressed up as fairies, gypsies and Little Red Riding Hoods, and boys disguised as pirates, royal pages and princes.

After the October Revolution, they tried to ban the Christmas tree and Christmas as a relic of the bourgeois past. Only in the late 1940s did masks again become a symbol of the holiday. At first they were made at home, but gradually finished products began to appear on sale. Mass production began for the VI World Festival of Youth and Students in 1957. In the 1970s, the technology of stamping masks from cardboard spread in many cities of the USSR.

Often, New Year’s masks were not made in specialized enterprises, but in cardboard factories or in sports goods production. In the funds of the Museum of Moscow, masks of a monkey, strawberry and a calf from the Sports Complex of the Voronezh Regional Council "Dynamo" have been preserved. Perhaps this was the largest production of carnival masks in the USSR in terms of the number of products and the variety of assortment. A workshop in Voronezh produced New Year’s masks from the 1950s until its closure in the 1990s.