Rustic «Parties» Through the Eyes of Komsomol Members of the 1920s (Based on the Materials of the State Archive of Modern History of the Smolensk Region)

The article publishes and analyzes two circular letters from the Komsomol committees of the Yelninsky and Gzhatsky districts of the Smolensk province dated 1925, which assess the traditional form of youth leisure – «parties» dedicated to the Christmas and Easter periods. Games with matrimonial symbols, ceremonial mummery and ritual forms of behavior have been targeted by critics. The documents record not only the forms of youth games that existed on the Russian-Belarusian border, but also a variety of vocabulary related to gaming culture. A comparison of these data with data from folklore, ethnographic and lexicographic sources makes it possible to talk about the preservation of a number of elements of folk holiday culture despite the ideological pressure of the first post-revolutionary decade. Dialect material collected on the Smolensk-Vitebsk-Mogilev border during the 20th century confirms that the vocabulary and phraseology associated with traditional youth games continues to exist, although the game forms themselves have already been lost. The published sources, despite their ideological orientation, are interesting from an ethnolinguistic point of view due to the availability of information about the traditional culture of a multiethnic region.