This is not, of course, a Christmas card, but was sent as
such, as a joke, by a friend.
The card in fact celebrates the Komsomol, the youth wing of
the Communist Party, and the girl is presumably holding a copy of Lenin’s biography or collected works,
with his name shown in Cyrillic.
Formed in 1918, the
Komsomol accepted recruits from the age of fourteen to the age of twenty eight,
although its leaders and functionaries could be older. Wikipedia has an
excellent page on its history and purpose, but does omit one significant fact.
Russia’s
great leader Stalin became increasingly distrustful of other centres of influence, and to maintain his iron grip the “man of steel” began in the 1930’s
his infamous purges of the military, government officials and fellow
politicians, which resulted in show trials and the deaths or exile of hundreds
of thousands of citizens. (Some suggest as many as a million). Of the first
seven leaders of the Komsomol, six were arrested and shot. The seventh was
merely arrested. Lucky break eh?
With the fall of communism, the Komsomol was disbanded in
1991.
