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The Easter service is the most important service, and the most beautiful, in the Russian Church. As Gogol once remarked, the Rus-sians have a special interest in celebrating Easter - for theirs is a faith based on hope. Shortly before midnight every member of the congregation lights a candle and, to the subdued singing of the choir, leaves the church in a procession with icons and banners. There is an atmosphere of rising expectation, suddenly released at the stroke of midnight, when the church doors open and the priest appears to proclaim in his deep bass voice 'Christ is risen!' - to which he receives the response from the thronging worshippers: 'He is risen indeed!' Then, as the choir chants the Resurrection Chant, the members of the congregation greet one another with a three-fold kiss and the words 'Christ is risen!' Easter was a truly national moment - a moment of communion between the classes. The landowner Maria Nikoleva recalled Easter with her serfs:

The peasants would come directly from church to exchange Easter greetings. There would be at least 500 of them. We would kiss them on the cheek and give them each a piece of kulicb [Easter cake] and an egg. Everyone had the right to wander all over our house on that day and I do not remember anything going missing or even being touched. Our father would be in the front room, where he received the most important and respected peasants, old men and elders. He would give them wine, pie, cooked meat and in the maid's room

our nanny would give out beer or homebrew. We received so many kisses from faces with beards that were not always very clean that we had to wash quickly so we wouldn't get a rash.¹³

The procession of the icons on the Easter Monday, in which icons were brought to every house for a blessing, was another ritual of communion. Vera Kharuzina, the first woman to become a professor of ethnography in Russia, has left us with a wonderful description of an icon being received in a wealthy merchant household in Moscow during the 1870s:

There were so many people who wanted to receive the Icon of the Heavenly Virgin and the Martyr that a list was always made up and an order given out to set the route of the procession round the city. My father always went to work early, so he preferred to invite the icon and the relics either early in the morning or late at night. The icon and the relics came separately and almost never coincided. But their visits left a deep impression. The adults in the house would not go to bed all night. Mother would just lie down for a while on the sofa. My father and my aunt would not eat anything from the previous evening onwards so as to be able to drink the holy water on an empty stomach. We children were put to bed early, and got up a long time before the arrival. The plants would be moved from the corner in the front room and a wooden divan put in their place, on which the icon could rest. A table would be placed in front of the divan and on it a snow white table cloth. A bowl of water would be placed on it for blessing, a dish with an empty glass, ready for the priest to pour holy water into it, candles and incense. The whole house would be tense with expectation. My father and my aunt would pace from window to window, waiting to see the carriage arrive. The icon and the relics would be transported about the city in a special carriage, which was extremely solid and cumbersome. The housekeeper would be standing in the hall, surrounded by her servants, who were ready to carry out her requests. The doorman would be looking out for the guests and we knew he would run to the front door as soon as he saw the carriage in the lane and knock hard in order to warn us of its arrival. Then we would hear the thunder of six strong horses approaching the gates. A young boy as postilion would sit at the front and a sturdy man would be posted at the back. Despite the severe frost at that time of year, both would travel with their heads uncovered. A cluster of people led