RUSSIA: A Palace for the Bride

“It seems to me,” wrote A. Usakovsky, a foreman at Moscow’s Likhachov Automobile Plant, “that many of those who get married in church do so not because they believe in God but because they like the ritual with its solemnity and color.” Even the Communist Party had to agree that Soviet weddings could hardly be more drab. Izvestia, carried away with the monotony of it all, even offered prizes for those who could think up elaborate and colorful rituals to substitute for Christian baptism, a coming-of-age ceremony that would correspond to confirmation, and a new wedding ritual.

By the Numbers. By Western standards, Soviet weddings are not really weddings at all, but a bit of bureaucratic business that young couples must go through at the local bureau of ZAGS, where births, deaths and marriages alike are registered. The couple can turn up in ordinary work clothes, get through the whole ceremony during an everyday lunch hour. “Will you keep your own name or take your husband’s?” an official asks the bride, reminding her that if she takes her husband’s, she must get a new internal passport within ten days. After that, the couple get a certificate saying that Citizen A and Citizeness B have “contracted marriage,” and the ceremony is over. “I congratulate you,” says the official, “upon your legal marriage.”

No matter how many champagne and caviar parties a couple’s friends may throw afterward, this sort of ceremony is no longer enough to satisfy the romantic yearnings of the Khrushchev generation. In the Estonian university town of Tartu, Registrar lime Toots had lately made quite a name for herself by providing a piano and a mixed chorus to sing Say It with Flowers to Me. Couples from all over Estonia flock to lime Toots, particularly on those great occasions Russians deem especially propitious for weddings, May Day and the Nov. 7 anniversary of the Communist Revolution.

Getting into the spirit of the thing, one Kalinin house of culture director suggested that the nation’s poets and composers hold a competition for the most romantic wedding march, and that each couple get a handsomely bound volume containing homilies by the country’s leading Soviet intellectuals. He also wanted peace doves released at each ceremony. But of all the proposals Izvestia received, none hit the mark so squarely as one from Odessa. After complaining about the “colorless and dreary routine” of the registry offices, V. Runanov suggested that every city have “a special building—the best in town” just for marriages and other happy events. Last week, as if to make V. Runanov’s dream come true, the U.S.S.R. got its first “wedding palace.”

By the Neva. It opened in Leningrad in what was once a nobleman’s mansion on the banks of the Neva, one of the many drably converted to bureaucratic uses. There, the bridal couple need spend only a few moments going through the dreary paper work. After that, they mount marble stairs as music by Chopin and Beethoven pours forth from speakers in the ceiling. In the great main hall, where nobility once danced, a deputy of the city soviet waits behind a mahogany table, and to the accompaniment of sweet Tchaikovsky melodies hands out the certificate and wedding rings. The soft lights of the candelabra rain down on a sculptured bust of Lenin, placed in a niche. And just in case the groom has forgotten the ring, glowed Komsomolskaya Pravda last week, he can pick one up at a souvenir shop next door —”You won’t find such a wide selection of rings, jewelry, necklaces, crystal, flowers and other gifts anywhere.”