Russia's holiday year opens with eight consecutive non-working days. The New Year holidays run from 1 to 8 January, absorbing Orthodox Christmas on the 7th, and they are by a wide margin the longest statutory break in any large economy. Russia has fourteen non-working public holidays in total, set out in Article 112 of the Labour Code, and it manages them with a transfer system that regularly turns Saturdays into working days and Mondays into holidays.
The Russian Holiday Calendar
| Date | Holiday | Description |
|---|---|---|
| January 1-6, 8 | New Year Holidays (Новогодние каникулы) | Extended break; celebrations, fireworks, Ded Moroz (Father Frost) |
| January 7 | Orthodox Christmas (Рождество) | Russian Orthodox Christmas; church services and family gatherings |
| February 23 | Defender of the Fatherland Day | Originally Soviet Army Day; now honours all men; gifts and celebrations |
| March 8 | International Women's Day | Major holiday; men give flowers and gifts to women in their lives |
| May 1 | Spring and Labor Day | Originally May Day; now a spring celebration; countryside trips |
| May 9 | Victory Day (День Победы) | The most solemn holiday; commemorates victory over Nazi Germany in WWII |
| June 12 | Russia Day (День России) | National Day; celebrates Russian sovereignty declared in 1990 |
| November 4 | Unity Day (День народного единства) | Replaced the Soviet-era November 7 Revolution Day in 2005 |
Eight Days in January
The New Year holidays were extended to their current length in 2005. Before that, only 1 and 2 January were non-working, with Orthodox Christmas added as a separate holiday in 1991 after seventy years of Soviet suppression.
The extension folded the two together, on the reasoning that most Russians took the intervening days off anyway. With adjacent weekends, the break routinely runs to ten or eleven days.
The economic effect is argued about annually. The Central Bank publishes analysis of the January slowdown, industry associations complain about lost output, and surveys consistently find that the public likes it. Alcohol consumption and emergency admissions both spike, which is also reported annually.
Orthodox Christmas Is on 7 January
The Russian Orthodox Church still uses the Julian calendar for its fixed feasts, which currently runs thirteen days behind the Gregorian. Christmas therefore falls on 7 January by the civil calendar.
Russia itself switched to the Gregorian calendar in February 1918, when 31 January was followed by 14 February. The Church did not follow, and the gap has persisted since.
The gap also produces Old New Year on 13 to 14 January, the new year by the Julian reckoning, which is not a public holiday but is widely marked as a smaller second celebration. The Orthodox churches of Greece, Cyprus, Romania and Bulgaria have adopted the revised Julian calendar and celebrate Christmas on 25 December; the Russian, Serbian, Georgian and Jerusalem churches have not.
Ded Moroz Comes on New Year, Not Christmas
Because Christmas was suppressed for most of the Soviet period, the gift-giving and tree-decorating traditions attached themselves to New Year instead, and they have stayed there.
The tree is a novogodnyaya yolka, a new year tree, and it goes up in late December and stays until mid-January. Presents arrive on the night of 31 December from Ded Moroz, Grandfather Frost, accompanied by his granddaughter Snegurochka, the Snow Maiden — a pairing with no equivalent in the Western Santa Claus tradition.
The president's televised address at 11.55pm on 31 December, followed by the Kremlin chimes at midnight, is watched by a very large share of the population. So is the film The Irony of Fate, broadcast every New Year since 1976, which has the same ritual status as a Christmas film elsewhere.
The Eleven Time Zones Problem
Russia spans eleven time zones, which complicates a national holiday in ways smaller countries do not face. Victory Day parades begin in Vladivostok while Moscow is still asleep, and the New Year is welcomed eleven separate times across the country.
State television broadcasts the president's New Year address multiple times, timed for each zone, and the Kremlin chimes are shown accordingly. The Far East celebrates nine hours before Moscow and Kaliningrad an hour after.
The number of zones has itself changed. Russia reduced them from eleven to nine in 2010 and restored eleven in 2014, and several regions have individually shifted since. Holiday scheduling is set federally in Moscow time and applied locally, which is one of the smaller ways in which the capital's clock governs the country.
The Transfer System
When a public holiday falls at a weekend, the government transfers the day off to a weekday, and the resulting schedule is published by government decree each autumn.
The decrees do more than shift single days. They frequently move a working day from a Monday or Friday to a preceding Saturday in order to create a longer block, so Russians periodically work a six-day week to buy a four-day one — the same tiaoxiu principle used in China, and equally unpopular.
The result is that the Russian working calendar has to be published as a document rather than derived from a rule. Payroll systems, schools and transport operators all work from the annual decree.
Defender of the Fatherland Day
23 February was Soviet Army and Navy Day and is now Defender of the Fatherland Day. It began in 1922 as the anniversary of the Red Army's first mass conscription in 1918 and became a non-working holiday only in 2002.
In practice it functions as an unofficial men's day. Women give gifts to male colleagues, partners and relatives, whether or not they have served, and the retail pattern around it resembles a Father's Day.
Its counterpart, International Women's Day on 8 March, is a full public holiday and works the same way in reverse. Both dates produce a large volume of flower sales, and 8 March is the single biggest day of the year for florists in Russia.
Victory Day
9 May marks the German surrender in 1945, signed late on 8 May Berlin time and therefore already 9 May in Moscow. It is the most important secular holiday in Russia by a wide margin.
The Soviet Union lost around 27 million people in the war, a figure that makes the observance unlike any other national commemoration. The Red Square parade, the Immortal Regiment marches in which people carry photographs of relatives who served, and the minute of silence are all central to it.
Victory Day was not a non-working holiday for most of the Soviet period. Stalin removed its holiday status in 1947, and it was restored in 1965 under Brezhnev, since when the military parade has become steadily larger.
Russia Day and Unity Day
Two of the fourteen days are post-Soviet inventions. Russia Day on 12 June marks the 1990 declaration of state sovereignty by the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, a year and a half before the USSR dissolved.
Unity Day on 4 November was introduced in 2005 to replace the 7 November holiday marking the October Revolution. It commemorates the 1612 expulsion of Polish-Lithuanian forces from Moscow, ending the Time of Troubles.
The replacement was a deliberate substitution of a pre-Soviet patriotic date for a Soviet one. 7 November remains a memorial date without holiday status, and the Communist Party continues to hold marches on it.
The Holidays That Were Removed
Soviet holidays that no longer have non-working status include 7 November, the Great October Socialist Revolution anniversary; 5 December, Constitution Day under the 1936 constitution; and the Paris Commune anniversary.
The current Constitution Day is 12 December, marking the 1993 constitution, and it was a non-working holiday from 1994 to 2004 before being downgraded to a memorable date.
Russia also observes a long list of professional days — Miners' Day, Railway Workers' Day, Teachers' Day, Border Guards' Day and dozens more — which carry no time off but are genuinely observed within the professions concerned, sometimes conspicuously.
Easter and the Religious Calendar
Orthodox Easter, Pascha, is the most significant date in the Russian church year and is not a federal public holiday. It falls on a Sunday and is calculated by the Julian computus, so it usually differs from Western Easter, sometimes by more than a month.
Several Russian regions declare Radonitsa, the ninth day after Easter when families visit graves, as a regional holiday. Republics with Muslim majorities — Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Chechnya, Dagestan, Ingushetia — declare Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha as regional non-working days.
Buddhist republics including Kalmykia, Buryatia and Tuva observe Tsagaan Sar, the lunar new year, regionally. Federal law allows regions to declare their own additional holidays, and around twenty do.
What Russian Workers Get
The Labour Code provides 28 calendar days of paid annual leave, roughly twenty working days, with longer entitlements for those working in the Far North, in hazardous conditions, or in certain professions. Workers in the Arctic regions can accrue substantially more.
Combined with fourteen public holidays, Russia is comfortably above the OECD average for statutory time off. Actual hours worked are also high, at over 1,800 a year.
The concentration in January is the distinctive feature. Russia takes a larger share of its annual holiday in a single block than almost any other country, and the effect on economic activity in the first two weeks of the year is visible in every dataset. For related context, see the countries where Russian is official and the count of countries in Europe.