> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://theparnassian.com/en/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# What Exactly Are We Celebrating Today?
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/chto-imenno-my-segodnia-prazdnuem/
- Published: 2026-05-01T08:52:01.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:26:11.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Observations, Society

What exactly are we celebrating today? It is a question to which, by and large, nobody has a coherent answer. In the calendar the day is called “Spring and Labour Day”. To quarrel over spring seems odd, particularly since everyone marks its arrival on 22 March already, while the notion of labour is so vague that one may fit under it the labour of the entrepreneur, the courier, the dealer in cheap Chinese goods, and the unlawful privatiser of a metallurgical holding.

The Soviet 1 May stood on a concrete foundation, of which no state in the world could boast either before or after. Free housing through a queue in which millions of families stood, and those millions did, more or less, receive flats from the state. Before you argue, ask ten elderly neighbours how they originally came by their flats. Guaranteed employment, paid holidays, sick leave, maternity leave, free medicine and education, sanatoria, vouchers, children's camps, trade unions that genuinely functioned, with the genuinely multibillion-rouble budget of the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions, a pension one could actually live on. This social package outweighs everything ever offered to the worker anywhere else on the planet. For seventy years the country existed in a system where the working man was a subject, and not merely a factor of production.

That in recent years the system began to misfire was an illness of its final stage, with its already familiar catalyst in the form of a leadership that had run wild. But there really was something to celebrate. Millions of people came out into the streets on 1 May, yes, by order, but that day truly had a substance with which other countries failed to furnish themselves.

After 1991 all of this crumbled. Free housing vanished quickly, guaranteed employment was replaced by the supple hand of the market, and should anything happen, the employer turns out to owe you nothing; the trade unions lost their assets and became an empty sound, strikes are legally almost impossible, and the pension has become, for most, a sum on which it is impossible to live, if one is lucky enough to earn it and wrest it from the pension fund. Medicine by insurance policy and free education, thank God, still exist for now, but shrink perceptibly with every new standard. Taxes, excise duties, recycling fees, insurance contributions, payments for major repairs: everything rises every year, while real incomes stand still or fall. A man who was not lucky enough to seep into the successful one per cent of the population lives today no better at all than his father and grandfather did in the Brezhnev years.

And all this against the backdrop of a wholly ossified space of public conversation about pressing problems.

In Europe, where 1 May comes from (it was devised in 1889 at the Second International in Paris in memory of the executed workers of Chicago), the date at least remains a day of strikes, trade-union marches and social demands. That is, a form in which working people remind the state that they have a voice. With us it has remained a day off, on which an attempt to raise one's voice would cost more than the grievance itself.

That is the answer to the question of why we need this holiday, why this extra day off. For nothing. It would be better if they credited each of us with a thousand roubles.