In Old Days, Winter Had a Special Warmth

Russians have not always worried about winter.

Despite its renowned severity, the season of hard, numbing cold was once a time of leisure for the Russian peasant--a time to sleep in front of the stove and enjoy the fruits of his labors during the previous three seasons.

It is a time of year glorified in Russian lore and romanticized in the country’s literature.

The 19th-Century Russian writer Alexander Pushkin, for example, wrote of “singing” frosts, fields “dressed” in white and stars that “whispered” to the snow. He wrote not of zima (winter) but of zimuchka (mother winter).

Russian youngsters are raised with a view that the cold has its brighter side. During the holiday season it is the Snow Maiden and Grandfather Frost, not Santa Claus, who are the premier personalities at children’s parties.

“It’s winter--the peasant, celebrating, carves out a new path with his horse-driven sleigh,” according to a popular poem taught to Russian schoolchildren.

Winter alters the rhythm of life in the countryside and in major cities. For most families, the diet shifts to root vegetables and the hearty winter soups of borscht and shchi. More time is spent in the kitchen around the samovar, a large and warm tea dispenser. To go outside without a hat is to be only partially dressed.

Despite the subzero cold, Muscovites often seem at their happiest cross-country skiing in the woods around the city or just strolling in a metropolis where fresh snow hides the dirt and debris that is so visible during other seasons.

Industrialization and communism have sapped some of winter’s lure. Rich peasants were declared the class enemy, farming was collectivized and the efficiency of food production dropped.

In the cities, going to work and returning home in the dark, shoving onto buses stuffed with people sweating in heavy coats, merely adds to the burden of everyday life.

With Soviet agriculture a shambles after long years of collectivization, and the distribution systems for fuel, food and medicine caught in the upheaval of the collapse of the Communist unitary state, Russians seem to feel more foreboding than excitement about the approaching winter.

How Cold Is It?

The world’s coldest recorded temperatures were all registered at unpopulated stations in Antarctice--the record is -128.6 degrees Fahrenheit at Vostok on July 21, 1983.

But the world’s coldest inhabited place is still Oymyakon, in what the Russians call the “Pole of Cold” in Eastern Siberia, where the thermometer hit -90.4 degrees Fahrenheit on Feb. 6, 1933. Here are some Soviet cold spots:

Moscow: January average, -14 degrees Fahrenheit

Leningrad: January average, -23 degrees Fahrenheit

Verkhoyansk: Greatest recorded temperature range, -90 degrees Fahrenheit to 98 degrees Fahrenheit

Oymyakon: Coldest inhabited place, -90.4 degrees Fahrenheit

Source: Guinness Book if World Records; Blue Guide to Moscow and Leningrad.