When you come into close contact with the era of the first years of October through documents, periodicals, memoirs of contemporaries, you are involuntarily amazed at how closely the holiday was connected with the revolution at that crucial time, the festive worldview with the revolutionary-transforming worldview, the festive emotional upsurge that gripped people, with revolutionary upsurge, what a colossal step forward the revolutionary festive aesthetics has taken. The revolutionary and festive enthusiasm of the working masses merged into one. For all that, each stage in the development of revolutionary socio-political holidays reflected the specific socio-political situation in the country.

On May 1, 1918, the first Soviet holiday took place. The young socialist republic publicly celebrated the Day of International Solidarity of Working People. It was a troubled time of military intervention and civil war. Thousands of rallies were held in the country, at which prominent figures of the revolution, workers, soldiers, and sailors spoke. On May 1, 1918, in Petrograd one could see how the columns of workers were going and going, “exhausted, hungry, but solemnly and courageously disposed. Thousands of banners are flying, posters are broadcasting great words that speak in each of our hearts.

On the May holiday of 1918, one of the first Soviet emblems, the Hammer and Sickle, appeared in Moscow, which soon became the basis of the State Emblem of the USSR. This emblem adorned the banners and banners of the Zamoskvoretsky district. “An unprecedented, unprecedented spectacle” was Moscow on the first October holiday of 1918. Red banners fluttered everywhere, huge colorful posters hung, emblems of the Soviet Republic, portraits of the leaders of the revolution. On the eve of the October holiday on November 6, an illumination was arranged in the capital: “Human waves are rolling in a continuous stream along the red, illuminated streets. Red cheerful highlights flash on clothes and faces, and everyone seems to be smart, dressed up in fantastic costumes. What enthusiasm, what joy on their faces. They walk arm in arm and laugh and sing free and proud songs. Cars decorated with red flags and flowers moved through the festive crowd. On them are children, workers; concerts were given from them. The demonstration surpassed "everything, even the most optimistic expectations, not only by the mass of its participants, but also by their mood, solemnly festive and at the same time firmly calm and menacingly restrained ..." wrote the newspaper Izvestiya VTSIK at the time. not idly demonstrating people, but fighters who have fought hard battles and are preparing for new battles, but in the interval between two fights they gave themselves some rest to calculate their strength, strengthen their energy by communicating with their brothers and shout their cry of triumph and hope to the whole world. On the first October holiday, each square in Moscow was an artistically completed spectacle. According to the newspaper Pravda, “looking at what the proletarian genius created on Sovietskaya Square, looking at its luxurious artistic decoration, you feel that the old system has perished forever and will never rise from the dead". On the day of the holiday, a symbolic "burning of the old regime" was arranged in many places: its personifications were burned - the preserved emblems of royal power, dummies of bourgeois, kulaks, clergymen, etc. The opening of monuments to the great people and revolutionaries. 11 monuments were opened in Moscow: to the revolutionaries - K. Marx, F. Engels, S. Khalturin, S. Perovskaya, J. Zhores, I. P. Kalyaev; advanced thinkers - M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, F. M. Dostoevsky, E. Verharn, G. Heine. In addition, during a meeting of workers of the Sushchevsko-Maryinsky district on Tsvetnoy Boulevard, the work of the sculptor S. D. Merkurov "Human Thought".

The October Revolution filled with a festive feeling, revolutionary romance, processions, processions, demonstrations, which were the main compositional elements of all revolutionary festivities. Festive rallies, demonstrations, accompanied by heated speeches, revolutionary songs, slogans, propaganda concerts, united the masses, inspired them to fight, revolutionized, and left an unforgettable mark on the personal destinies of people.

Art becomes an integral part of revolutionary holidays. The first revolutionary banner, ordered by V. I. Lenin for the celebration of the first anniversary of October, was painted by talented artists A. V. Kuprin and A. V. Lentulov. Now this banner is kept in the State Museum of the Revolution of the USSR in Moscow. Such well-known innovative directors as K. A. Mardzhanov, N. V. Petrov, N. P. Okhlopkov, S. E. Radlov, V. N. Solovyov, and others took an active part in organizing revolutionary festivities. Under the conditions of civil war and post-war devastation, thousands of participants from the people under their leadership created majestic holidays that served the revolution29. Such well-known artists as K. Petrov-Vodkin, V. Kustodiev, M. Dobuzhinsky, V. Shukhaev, V. Lebedev, A. Osmerkin, A. Kuprin, P. Kuznetsov, P. Korin, took an active part in their design. N. Altman, S. V. Gerasimov and others.

The echo of those festivities for us, contemporaries, was a series of paintings by the oldest Soviet artist Alexander Tyshler called "Decoration of revolutionary festivities during the civil war" (1976-1977). Figurative paintings-memories tell about the festive atmosphere of those years, about the means of "expressing" the holiday. So, in his work “Procession with Scarecrows”, young men and women move in a compact group, a little ahead is a Komsomol member in a Red Guard helmet, with a scarlet bow on his chest; they have poles in their hands, on which effigies of bourgeois, NEPmansh, White Guards are attached ... For the celebration of the first anniversary of October, for example, Theater Square in Moscow was decorated by artists P. Korin, S. Gerasimov and others. village." It adorned the fading autumn foliage of the trees in the square with huge bright flowers in the style of a popular popular print. The panel “Science and Art Bring Their Gifts to Labor” was painted by the artist N. M. Chernyshev. The theme of the panel by Sergei Gerasimov, which adorned the building of the former City Duma (now the Museum of V. I. Lenin), was "The Peasant - the owner of the land." The former Nezlobiya Theater (now the Central Children's Theater) was decorated with the works of A. V. Kuprin "Flowers" and "Art". According to Sergei

Gerasimov, “all of Moscow was decorated for the first anniversary of the Great October Revolution. I well remember the design of Theater Square. On the building of the Metropol there is a huge panel "Worker" by I. Zakharov, at the Maly Theater - a panel "Stepan Razin" by P. Kuznetsov and A. Osmerkin. The Bolshoi Theater was decorated with portraits of K. Marx and V. I. Lenin, banners and slogans.” And further: “On the first anniversary of October, Moscow was decorated very boldly and colorfully and presented an exceptional spectacle in terms of the grandeur of the scale of decoration, expressing the great feelings of the people, born of the majestic events of the socialist revolution”30. At this time, the artist A. V. Kuprin introduced into the panel the image of the Soviet coat of arms as a symbol of people's power. The introduction of the State Emblem into the composition of the panel decorating the city will subsequently be widely used in various types of monumental propaganda.

In Central Asia, the founder of the new socialist Uzbek traditions, Khamza Hakim-zade Niyazi, played an important role in organizing the first folk holidays. He was an excellent connoisseur of folklore and folk spectacles of the East. This allowed him to include such folk forms as the art of mascaraboz and kizikchi (comedy improvisations), safsat (philosophizing), candi (competitions in wit), etc. in the scenarios of the holidays. Khamza widely used in his productions of spectacles for the people and Russian propaganda drama, creatively developing it, taking into account local living conditions.

Khamza was the initiator and organizer of the first revolutionary "toys" - holidays in honor of the victory of October (in Andijan, Tashkent, Bukhara, Khiva, Khojeyli) and International Women's Day on March 8 (in the villages of Av-val and Shakhimardan of the Ferghana Valley). Taking the traditional form of "oriental evenings", which before the revolution was limited to showing a few performances, he turned it into a three-day mass theatrical celebration, including folk festivals, mass dramatizations, propaganda performances and concerts. In the future, the creative experience of Khamza was used in the development of other progressive folk holidays, such as Navruz bayrami (spring New Year's holiday), gul bayrami (rose festival), kavun sayli (melon festival), uzum sayli (grape festival), khirmon bayrami (now buttermilk bayrami - cotton festival).

V. I. Lenin attached great importance to the formation of new proletarian traditions, new national holidays, and the formation of a new way of life. It is not accidental that Lenin reprimanded the notes he received after his speech on March 8, 1919, in front of female workers who came from different parts of the country to attend women's courses. According to the memoirs of S. T. Lyubimova, who at that time headed the work of the Zhenotdel of the Central Asian Bureau of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, Lenin said: “All comrades want to go to the front. This is wrong, wrong, because to consolidate the gains of the revolution in the rear, to build a new way of life is no less important task. Despite being extremely busy, V. I. Lenin took a lively part in the festive celebrations. So, in December 1917, he celebrated the New Year with the workers of the Vyborg side in the assembly hall of the Mikhailovsky School; constantly participated in the celebration of the anniversaries of the Great October Revolution and the celebration of May 1; On November 14, 1920, he attended a peasant holiday in the village of Kashino, Volokolamsk district, where the first power plant was opened; October 22, 1921 attended the celebrations dedicated to the laying of the first furrow by the first Soviet electric plow; May 1, 1922 attended the celebrations on the occasion of the launch of the Kashirskaya power plant. In the conditions of social transformations in the country, the propagandistic role of new holidays and rituals contributed to the formation of a new "worldview, free from religious views; the emergence of new relations, freed from religious barriers; a new psychology devoid of superstitions. The restructuring of consciousness, psychology, the whole way of life, in fact, was a task set by the utopian socialists, now it was being solved by the communists of Soviet Russia, headed by V. I. Lenin. It is no coincidence that on the second anniversary of October on the front page of the newspaper Izvestia of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee there were such lines: "For socialist Russia, a new people's psychology. This psychology is beginning to develop. The difficult moment of a turning point, when the old, slavish psychology, built on the threat of a stick or starvation, has died, and the new one, based on the consciousness of its duty to its class and society, has not yet taken shape - this moment is passing by us on A new psychology of free people, masters of life and participants in collective creativity is being born, which will give a strong impetus to the growth of productive forces when it embraces people.”

The grandiosity and revolutionary nature of the tasks of restructuring the consciousness and the entire way of life of people required appropriate forms. The task of creating visible, "materialized" symbols of the revolution and the ideas of the socio-cultural progress of mankind had to be solved by means of monumental propaganda, and especially monumental art. Therefore, from the first years of Soviet power, a characteristic sign of every national holiday was the opening of memorials that reflected "the ideas and feelings of revolutionary labor Russia." The decree on monuments of the republic (April 1918) instructed a special commission to “mobilize artistic forces and organize a wide competition to develop projects of monuments that should commemorate the great days of the Russian socialist revolution”34.

The festive vernissages were part of Lenin's program for the development of socialist construction and the transformation of public life by means of monumental propaganda.

V. I. Lenin closely followed the activities to establish the first memorial plaques and monuments and always sought to take a direct part in the ceremonies of their laying or opening. During the celebration of the first anniversary of October, V. I. Lenin spoke at the opening of the monument to K. Marx and F. Engels. From Revolution Square, Lenin, along with the demonstrators, went to Red Square, where he opened a memorial plaque erected in memory of the fighters of the October Revolution. It depicted a white-winged figure with a branch of peace in his hand and the inscription "To the fallen in the struggle for peace and the brotherhood of peoples." On May 1, 1919, Lenin took part in the opening of a temporary monument to Stepan Razin near the Execution Ground on Red Square. On May Day 1920, which the IX Party Congress called for to be held as a "grand All-Russian subbotnik", on the Prechistenskaya embankment of the Moscow River, Lenin laid the monument "Liberated Labor". Thus, monumental visual-spectacular propaganda, expressed by means of art, oriented to an audience of many thousands, became an integral part of the mass revolutionary celebrations.

The aesthetics of revolutionary festivity is also characterized by the features of folk festivals: mass performances of actors, festive booths, propaganda trams, propaganda trains, rallies and concerts.

A large role in the ideological and political education and rallying of the masses was played at that time by rallies-concerts and rallies-performances, which constituted an important part of the program of revolutionary holidays. For example, in Moscow on the second anniversary of the October Revolution in the cinema "Coliseum" in the program of the rally-concert was a report on Soviet power. Those assembled unanimously adopted a resolution with greetings from the Red Army and the St. Petersburg workers. These greetings are not accidental: the White Guard troops of Yudenich were defeated near Petrograd.

Just a few decades ago, the jewelry community did not even know about the existence of this stone. Today, black diamonds are at the peak of popularity. Scientists have added excitement, having calculated that they are the oldest and rarest of the diamonds on the planet.

The first copies were found in Brazil and Central Africa. The finds turned out to be accidental, there are no rules for finding such places.

Two versions of their origin have been developed.

space

The stones were brought to Earth by meteorites. The experiments of scientists from the US National Laboratory showed that the stone contains hydrogen, which is rich in space. American geologist Dr. Stephen Haggerty believes that this happened in an era when America and Africa were a single continent. This explains the strangeness with the location of the deposits.

earthly

Stones could be erupted by a volcano. The proof is the parameters of the minerals found in the lava of the Kamchatka volcano (composition, structure).

Scientists determine the age of a black diamond to be four billion years older than that of its "brilliant" counterparts.

Such stones never intersect in the rock with ordinary ones that are common throughout the planet, they lie shallow, like ordinary ones, but almost on the surface.

This clearly indicates that black and white diamonds have a different "pedigree".

18.11.2016 gemstones

The Black Diamonds have completed their transition from supporting roles to leading roles. Now they compete with other stones for the center stone in wedding or engagement rings. It is worth considering in more detail what lies behind the unique appearance of this mysterious gem.

A Brief History of Black Diamonds

The so-called "fancy black" natural diamonds in the most recent past were little valued. The author J. R. Sutton wrote in his book in 1928: “An ordinary black diamond is not much different from black sealing wax. Opinions differ in assessing its merits as a precious stone.

There are only a few known black diamonds. The most famous of them is the 67.50 carat Black Orlov, which is also called the Eye of Brahman. It is said of him that this stone was stolen from an idol in India in the early 1800s, and therefore it was cursed. The power of this curse was such that many owners of this gem committed suicide. As a result, Black Orlov was recut to destroy witchcraft.

Consumers did not show much interest in black diamonds until the end of the 20th century, when designers began to use these stones in jewelry, as if in contrast to tiny colorless pavé diamonds (French Pave).

Black diamond engagement rings came of age when Mr. Big gave Carrie a 5 carat black diamond engagement ring at the end of Sex and the City 2 in 2010. This stone attracted even more press attention when, a couple of years later, Karmen Electra and Kat Von D showed the public their black diamond engagement rings. Interest in this stone continues to grow.

Why are black diamonds black?

The reason for the black color in these mysterious stones has been investigated relatively recently. It is now known that natural black diamonds get their color from large clouds of microscopic inclusions of minerals such as graphite, pyrite or hematite, which are dispersed throughout the stone. Also, these diamonds often contain numerous cracks that appear black due to graphitization. It is the concentration of all these internal inclusions that makes a diamond black.

Natural black diamonds tend to be completely opaque, with a high luster that gives these stones an almost metallic appearance. Due to the many inclusions, polishing these stones can be a very difficult task. They should also be fixed in decoration with great care.

Most black diamonds used in jewelry and engagement rings have been treated to enhance their color. Initially, many of them were gray diamonds, with a large number of inclusions, which were subjected to high-temperature processing, which turned their color into black. Irradiation with fast particles in a linear accelerator can also turn a gray diamond into black, or rather a rich dark green, but such stones, although they look black, usually retain some transparency.

How are black diamonds valued?

In the GIA 4Cs™ international nomenclature system - (color, clarity, cut quality and carat weight) - only colorless or almost colorless diamonds together, colors from D to Z are evaluated. Black diamonds do not fall into this range, and therefore are evaluated on the basis of GIA color classification system for colored diamonds.

Since black diamonds are opaque due to the large number of inclusions, the GIA clarity classification cannot be used for them. The second point, due to the complete opacity, these stones do not have any changes in tone and saturation (unlike, for example, pink, yellow or blue diamonds), so only one hue description class is used - “fancy black”.

Due to this fact, the GIA does not issue full gemological certificates for black diamonds. Instead, the GIA issues special documents for them: identification and color origin reports. In these documents, black diamonds are described as "fancy black" and the origin of their color is also noted: natural or obtained as a result of refining.

Caring for black diamonds

The nature of a black diamond is such that it can contain hundreds if not thousands of microscopic cracks. Although the diamond is valued for its superior hardness, these multiple internal defects make black diamonds more vulnerable to breakage than colorless diamonds.

Care and cleaning of black diamond jewelry is the same as for any other precious stones that require a delicate approach. Do not use steam cleaners or ultrasonic cleaners. These methods can lead to the destruction of the stone

Black diamonds have a unique, dramatic beauty. And if the relationship in your couple fits this description, the black diamond is your stone and the stone of your spouse.

Also, if you are attracted to black diamonds, then you may be interested in another mysterious color diamond - white.