Friday is May Day, the ancient spring festival whose roots can be traced back to second century Rome. The day hailed what was originally the first day of summer, but because of changes in ancient calendars over the millennia, what we recognize today settled on the first of May. Across the centuries, May Day has come to represent different things to different people. Fertility dances and holding paper streamers while dancing around the maypole may seem hokey and old-fashioned to today’s cynical, high-tech world, but it is still part of the celebration in many places. Another tradition, that of delivering baskets of flowers, fruit and candy, also thrives. Although this year, the coronavirus pandemic has moved these rituals from the forests and green grass of the great outdoors to the great virtual indoors. Cubans paint a wall in commemoration of May Day, in San Jose, Cuba, on April 28, 2020. This year’s May Day celebrations would be from home, respecting social isolation, and not at the Revolution Square.In the late 1880s, May Day began to morph into a double holiday — the start of summer and International Workers’ Day, proclaimed by U.S. communists and socialists to remember an 1886 labor strike in Chicago that turned violent. Bombs were tossed, police and marchers were shot and killed. Four American labor leaders were hanged after what unionists say was an unfair trial. May Day became a day of pro-labor rallies and an excuse for overwhelming military parades through Red Square in Moscow and throughout the Soviet Union. But since the USSR collapsed in 1991, young Russians have lost their passion for International Workers’ Day. Anton Fedyashin, is an associate professor of history at American University in Washington, specializing in Russian studies. He is skeptical that any group of young Russians would know what May Day is about. “What they’d probably say is that’s a day off and they have no idea what it’s about nor do they care. You can find probably a handful of exceptions of young people who are members of the Communist party or maybe Socialist party who would actually know what this is about, but for the most part, these kids don’t know anything. So they just treat it as a day off.” Fedyashin doesn’t really fault the kids and Russian 20-somethings for not knowing the significance of May 1 because, he says, there are reasons the pro-labor fervor for May Day has “completely fallen away.” “One is of course the end of the Soviet Union, the fact that the ideology isn’t there and manual labor is no longer put on a pedestal and considered noble by virtue of simply being … the idea of organized labor, of collective bargaining has also fallen away. By the 1980s and the 1990s, the importance and the strength of unions has declined,” he said. Care workers and members of CGT union, demonstrate in front of La Pitie Salpetriere hospital in Paris on April 30, 2020, on the eve of the May Day traditional march, during a lockdown in France to stop the spread of COVID-19.And not just in Russia. Fedyashin said manufacturing is on the decline in the West and the tech industry has eclipsed manual labor as the engine driving the global economy. “So for May Day, you can say it’s been a perfect storm of the implosion of Soviet ideology and the general diversification of economic productivity and that’s eclipsed the importance of May 1st as international labor day,” Fedyashin said. Despite the lost fervor and the coronavirus, a number of May Day actions are still planned in parts of Europe. Russian trade unions will for the first time replace Workers’ Day demonstrations in the streets with a massive online action. Hundreds of Czech commuters plan a roadblock at the Czech-German border crossing to protest the government-imposed lockdown, and marches are still set to take place in Athens, Lisbon, Paris and Vienna. But in the U.S., an annual Minneapolis May Day puppet theater, street festival, and dancing in the park has been canceled.
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