The Spring Festival at Spaso House was an event held on the night of April 23 to April 24, 1935, at Spaso House, the residence of the U.S. Ambassador in Moscow. Approximately 500 guests and members of the American diplomatic corps attended the event. According to the embassy secretary, these included "everyone who mattered in Moscow, except Stalin". Alexander Etkind highlighted three groups of attendees: Bolshevik intellectuals, senior military commanders, and the theatrical elite. The event was organized by the first U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union, who served as a special assistant to the U.S. Secretary of State from 1933 to 1936, William Christian Bullitt Jr.. The arrangements for decorating Spaso House and organizing the festival program were handled by embassy staff member Charles Thayer and the wife of one of the diplomats, Irena Wiley.
On October 29, 2010, U.S. Ambassador to Russia John Beyrle hosted a reception to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the ball at Spaso House that inspired Mikhail Bulgakov. In 2024, an exchange of remarks regarding the Spring Festival took place between the official representative of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Maria Zakharova, and the U.S. Ambassador to Russia, Lynne Tracy. The topic of the Spring Festival has been frequently covered by Russian mass media, sometimes including details absent from the memoirs, letters, and diaries of its organizers and guests.
Preparation
There are two reported dates for the festive reception held at the residence of the U.S. Ambassador in 1935. Specifically, the official website of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow dates the event to the night of April 23–24, 1935. However, in the works of Doctor of Philology and candidate of historical sciences Boris Vadimovich Sokolov, for instance, it is stated that the reception at Spaso House took place on the night of April 22–23. Spaso House is the name of the U.S. Ambassador's residence in Moscow. The event was officially called the "Spring Festival." Approximately 500 guests and members of the American diplomatic corps attended.Some sources claim that the 500 figure refers only to invited guests. According to the embassy secretary, the attendees included "everyone who mattered in Moscow, except Stalin". Doctor of Philosophy in Slavic philology and candidate of psychological sciences Alexander Etkind identified three groups among the festival's guests: Bolshevik intellectuals, senior military commanders, and the theatrical elite. The event was organized by the first U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union, who also served as a special assistant to the U.S. Secretary of State from 1933 to 1936, William Christian Bullitt Jr.. Initially, his appointment as ambassador was well-received by Soviet party and state leadership. However, starting in early 1934, Bullitt's relations with Soviet authorities deteriorated, as evidenced by his published reports to Washington. In correspondence with the U.S. State Department and President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Bullitt referred to Stalin as a "Caucasian bandit" and described the Soviet Union as the embodiment of evil.
The secretary of the U.S. Embassy, Charles W. Thayer, wrote in his memoir Bears in the Caviar that the vibrant social life of foreign diplomats in Moscow during the 1930s began in early autumn and continued until late spring. In summer, social life slowed and was limited to individual receptions. American diplomats had long remained on the sidelines but became actively involved after Bullitt's arrival in Moscow. He attended several receptions, concerts, and balls at various diplomatic missions, but they did not leave a strong impression on him.
The wife of American diplomat John Cooper Wiley, Irena Wiley noted in her memoirs that tensions in the USSR sharply escalated in 1935 following the assassination of Sergei Kirov, head of the Leningrad party organization, member of the Politburo, Orgburo, and Secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), on December 1, 1934. Before this, embassy staff had "frequently and freely" interacted with Soviet citizens, according to her. Now, contacts were restricted and tightly controlled. Irena Wiley described this shift as an "iron curtain" imposed by Stalin. Amid cooling relations between the two countries and the repressions described by Wiley, which affected Soviet politicians and diplomats she knew personally, she characterized the Spring Festival as follows: "It was one of the rarest occasions, more rare and precious than the whooping crane, when ideological differences and Communist hatred dissolved in an atmosphere of joy and friendship". Wiley's assessment of Soviet citizens' sentiments aligns with a fragment of a letter from William Bullitt to the U.S. President, sent on May 1, 1935: "Emotionally, Moscow is far from a pleasant place. The terror, always present, has reached such a degree that both the least and the most prominent Muscovites live in fear. Almost no one dares to interact with foreigners, and this is not an unfounded fear but a correct perception of reality".William C. Bullitt for Franklin D. Roosevelt. Personal and Confidential. May 1, Moscow, 1935 // For the President, personal and secret; correspondence between Franklin D. Roosevelt and William C. Bullitt. — Boston.: Houghton Mifflin[англ.], 1972. — P. 116.
Doctor of Philosophy in history Michael Casella-Blackburn attempted to contextualize the Spring Festival within the daily life of Moscow at the time, using Bullitt's letters from spring 1935. The ambassador noted a dual atmosphere in the capital. Emotional tension was undeniable, dominating the country. At the same time, recently introduced polo and baseball matches between Red Army soldiers and American diplomats continued. Bullitt wrote: "The Soviet Union is developing faster than ever before… the economic situation is improving, and people are increasingly adapting to communism"; "Moscow has become a more pleasant place than it was at this time last year. The metro has been built. Blocks of old buildings have been transformed into streets and squares, and street paving has improved." From the perspective of the American researcher, the Spring Festival was an attempt by the ambassador to enliven the capital's nightlife. In a record of oral memoirs by Elena Bulgakova, transcribed by literary scholar Vera Chebotaryova, the writer's wife claimed that William Bullitt annually held a reception for an American national holiday [unspecified] and that the April 23 event was one such reception.
According to instructions William Christian Bullitt left for embassy staff when departing for Washington for political consultations in the winter of 1934–1935, the upcoming event was to "surpass anything Moscow had seen before or after the Revolution." According to Charles Thayer, Bullitt expressed his expectations with the phrase: "The sky is the limit" (Irena Wiley claimed this phrase appeared in a telegram Bullitt sent to embassy staff from Washington, not in a personal conversation). In the published Russian translation, it means: "I'm not limiting you in any way," though literally: "The sky is the limit". The ball was timed to coincide with Bullitt's return to Moscow and was to take place three days after his arriva.l The event's preparation was overseen by embassy secretary Charles Thayer and Irena Wiley. It was Wiley who proposed the name "Spring Festival". Bullitt personally funded the event's expenses.
Irena Wiley later wrote that she had dreamed of choreographing and staging a ballet, but organizing a party seemed far more exciting. She admitted that her student experience of organizing parties on a minimal budget helped her address the challenges of preparation. Wiley described the festival's organizer, Charles Thayer, as a young man with boundless imagination and "Napoleonic disdain" for the word "impossible." At a meeting of those involved in the festival's preparation, it was decided to use green (tree leaves and grass), white (lambs and roosters), and gold (used to paint the animals' horns and hooves, as well as the structural elements of bird cages) as the color scheme.
Irena Wiley noted that preparing such an event in Europe or America would have posed no issues, but in Moscow, they faced significant challenges: there was "nothing in the shops, nothing in the market". The only issue quickly resolved, according to her, was the delivery of thousands of bulbs of tulips from Holland. Thayer wrote that tulips for the ball were initially sought within the Soviet Union but were ultimately purchased in Finland. However, they were already cut, posing the challenge of preserving them until the event. This was resolved using a cool pantry. Thayer noted the unusual cold in the USSR in April 1935 — ten days before the ball, there were still no buds on trees or blooming flowers in the Moscow Region. According to Thayer, a specially chartered plane was sent to Crimea to procure any flowers it could find. The flight was unsuccessful. The weather in Tbilisi was even colder than in Moscow, where the pilot went after Crimea. Wiley, however, only mentioned telegrams sent to Crimea and the Caucasus, with no reference to a specially hired pilot. She spoke not of flowers but of birch trees with budding leaves. During the event, tiny electric fans were discreetly placed near the tulips, making them sway as if in the wind.
According to Thayer in Bears in the Caviar, he already had experience organizing entertainment in the capital. At a previous reception at the ambassador's residence, he had invited trainer Vladimir Durov, who performed circus acts with three seals. The seals juggled balls, climbed up and down a ladder, and even played a Christmas melody on a hand organ. When the trainer got drunk, a female seal named Lyuba entered the buffet and then the kitchen, where she began overturning coal buckets, trash cans, and kitchen furniture. Irena Wiley insisted that animals should again be a key feature of this reception. She planned to create a miniature barnyard in a corner of the ballroom. The plan included borrowing several lambs, acquiring a number of wildflowers, and placing potted birch trees. A kolkhoz agreed to lend sheep, but their smell was noticeable even in the spacious ballroom. Attempts to wash them or spray them with perfume during rehearsals were unsuccessful. Wiley attributed this issue to requesting lambs but receiving adult sheep instead. She personally washed six sheep in a bathroom and, based on that experience, decided never to repeat the process. Young goats fared somewhat better, according to Thayer, but even their presence caused discomfort in the ballroom. The director of the Moscow Zoo suggested mountain goats (Wiley simply mentioned a dozen regular goats), which he claimed had less odor. A miniature barnyard was built on a platform near the buffet table. Wiley wrote that with gilded horns and hooves, the goats, jumping and playing in a small, decorated, and fenced area, were highly decorative.