Christmas

No one knows what day Jesus Christ was born on. From the biblical description, most historians believe
that his birth probably occurred in September, approximately six months after Passover. One thing they
agree on is that it is very unlikely that Jesus was born in December, since the bible records shepherds
tending their sheep in the fields on that night. This is quite unlikely to have happened during a cold
Judean winter. So why do we celebrate Christ’s birthday as Christmas, on December the 25th?

The answer lies in the pagan origins of Christmas. In ancient Babylon, the feast of the Son of Isis
(Goddess of Nature) was celebrated on December 25. Raucous partying, gluttonous eating and drinking,
and gift-giving were traditions of this feast.

In Rome, the Winter Solstice was celebrated many years before the birth of Christ. The Romans called
their winter holiday Saturnalia, honoring Saturn, the God of Agriculture. In January, they observed the
Kalends of January, which represented the triumph of life over death. This whole season was called Dies
Natalis Invicti Solis, the Birthday of the Unconquered Sun. The festival season was marked by much
merrymaking. It is in ancient Rome that the tradition of the Mummers was born. The Mummers were
groups of costumed singers and dancers who traveled from house to house entertaining their neighbors.
From this, the Christmas tradition of caroling was born.

In northern Europe, many other traditions that we now consider part of Christian worship were begun
long before the participants had ever heard of Christ. The pagans of northern Europe celebrated the their
own winter solstice, known as Yule. Yule was symbolic of the pagan Sun God, Mithras, being born, and
was observed on the shortest day of the year. As the Sun God grew and matured, the days became longer
and warmer. It was customary to light a candle to encourage Mithras, and the sun, to reappear next year.

Huge Yule logs were burned in honor of the sun. The word Yule itself means “wheel,” the wheel being a
pagan symbol for the sun. Mistletoe was considered a sacred plant, and the custom of kissing under the
mistletoe began as a fertility ritual. Hollyberries were thought to be a food of the gods.

The tree is the one symbol that unites almost all the northern European winter solstices. Live evergreen
trees were often brought into homes during the harsh winters as a reminder to inhabitants that soon their
crops would grow again. Evergreen boughs were sometimes carried as totems of good luck and were
often present at weddings, representing fertility. The Druids used the tree as a religious symbol, holding
their sacred ceremonies while surrounding and worshipping huge trees.

In 350, Pope Julius I declared that Christ’s birth would be celebrated on December 25. There is little
doubt that he was trying to make it as painless as possible for pagan Romans (who remained a majority at
that time) to convert to Christianity. The new religion went down a bit easier, knowing that their feasts
would not be taken away from them.

Christmas (Christ-Mass) as we know it today, most historians agree, began in Germany, though Catholics
and Lutherans still disagree about which church celebrated it first. The earliest record of an evergreen
being decorated in a Christian celebration was in 1521 in the Alsace region of Germany. A prominent
Lutheran minister of the day cried blasphemy: “Better that they should look to the true tree of life,
Christ.”

The controversy continues even today in some fundamentalist sects.

The Year the World Really Changed
Forget the fall of the iron curtain: the events of '79
matter more.
What exactly was the historical significance of Nov. 9, 1989? Having spent much of the
summer of that year in Berlin, I have long bitterly regretted that I was not there to join
in the party the night the wall came down. I mean, what kind of an aspirant historian
misses history being made?

But two Berlin friends recently made me feel better by confessing that, despite being in
the right city on the right date, they too missed the fall of the wall. One simply slept
through the tumultuous events that unfolded after an East German official casually
stated that the border was open. Her brother tried to rouse her, but she assumed he was
joking when he shouted through her bedroom door: "The wall's coming down!" My
other friend deliberately went to bed early to be fresh for a morning yoga class. It took
her a while the next morning to work out why she was the only one to show up.

Embarrassing, no? A bit like being in Petrograd in late 1917 and catnapping while the
Bolsheviks stormed the Winter Palace. Or perhaps not. For it is only with the benefit of
hindsight that the Bolshevik coup proved to be a major historical turning point; at the
time, the Russian press represented it as just another extremist stunt.

That set me thinking. Could it be that my friends and I didn't in fact miss an event of
world-historical importance? Was the fall of the Berlin Wall not really History with a
capital H, but just news with a lower-case n—a wonderful story for journalists but, 20
years on, actually not that big a deal? Could it be that what happened 10 years earlier, in
the annus mirabilis 1979, was the real historical turning point?

Sure, it was nice for East Germans, Czechs, Hungarians, and Poles—not to mention the
peoples of the Baltics, the Balkans, Ukraine, and the Caucasus—that they got rid of
dreary communism and discovered the pleasures (and occasional pains) of free markets
and free elections. What the British historian and eye-witness Timothy Garton Ash has
called the "refolution" (reform plus revolution) that swept Central and Eastern Europe
was a splendid thing, not least because the communist regimes were toppled with
amazingly little bloodshed. Only in Yugoslavia, where the communists clung to power
in the guise of Serbian nationalists, was there the kind of carnage that usually
accompanies the end of empire—and Yugoslavia, paradoxically, was the Eastern
European country that had been the first to break free of Moscow, and the first to
introduce market reforms.
It may seem perverse to question the historical significance of the collapse of the Soviet
empire in Mitteleuropa, and then the collapse of the Soviet Union itself. I suspect most
Americans today share the Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis's view that 1989 saw the
triumphant end of the Cold War, a victory achieved above all by President Ronald
Reagan, though nobly assisted by Margaret Thatcher—despite her deep reservations
about the unintended consequences of German reunification—and the Polish Pope John
Paul II.

Yet for Princeton revisionist -Stephen Kotkin, the real story of 1989 is that of a cynical
pseudo-revolution from above. Only high oil prices had kept the bankrupt Soviet empire
alive during the 1970s, Kotkin argued in his 2001 book, Armageddon Averted. Now, in
his iconoclastic follow-up, Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist
Establishment, Kotkin dismisses the role of Eastern European dissidents, much less
Western leaders, in the Soviet collapse. No, Mikhail Gorbachev and other communist
reformers wrecked their own system, partly out of naiveté, partly out of a cynical desire
to grab the system's few valuable assets in what became the scam of the century: the
privatization of the Russian energy industry. For the wilier members of the
nomenklatura, the road from KGB apparatchiki to Gazprom biznesmen was a
remarkably short, though crooked one.

Not only did the same kind of people end up running Russia as had run it before 1989—
step forward, Vladimir Putin—but they managed to avert a complete breakdown of the
vast Russian Federation itself. The Soviet empire had gone, but to a large extent the
Russian empire remained, extending all the way from Volgograd to Vladivostok: still
the last European empire in Asia, with a territorial extent that would have delighted
Peter the Great.

Viewed this way, 1989 was a moment of revelation, not revolution: it revealed the true
nature of Russian power by stripping away the deceptive trappings of superpower
status. Denuded of its Central European sphere of influence, with its economy exposed
to market forces for the first time since 1914, Russia turned out to be somewhere
between a BRIC (along with Brazil, India, and China, the biggest of the world's
emerging markets) and "Upper Volta with missiles" (in Helmut Schmidt's famous put-
down)—or maybe Nigeria with snow.

Consider the following. Russia's economy is set to be one of the world's worst
performers this year, with gross domestic product forecast to decline in real terms by 7.5
percent. True, this comes after a decade of 7 percent average annual growth, but much
of that merely represented recovery from the shattering post-communist depression of
the mid-1990s. Russian GDP recovered to its 1989 level only in 2006. Calculated in
terms of dollars, it now represents a meager 9 percent of U.S. GDP (compared with
China's 23 percent). Unlike China's, Russia's currency has been all over the place in the
past year, rising to above 36 rubles to the dollar in 2008, though now back to 29.
Inflation is back in double digits, at about 13 percent. And Russian stocks have been the
worst performers among the BRIC economies over the past three years, returning minus
12 percent a year, compared with 16 percent for China
Add to the poor economic picture demographic projections that foresee the population
of Egypt overtaking that of Russia by 2045, and it becomes clear that the once mighty
Russian bear is in fact a distinctly mangy old bruin. Not really surprising, with a
tuberculosis infection rate that is just half that of Bangladesh, but 27 times that of the
United States.

The biggest danger for the United States, 20 years after this Russian revelation, is that
we overrate Moscow, whether as a potential partner or an antagonist. At times,
President Obama shows signs of believing his Russian counterpart, Dmitry Medvedev,
when he offers to work in tandem with the United States on issues ranging from radical
Islamic terrorism to Iran's nuclear program—hence Obama's decision to cancel the
planned missile-defense installations in Poland and the Czech Republic. The reality,
however, is that today's Russia is more of a troublemaker than an ally-in-the-making.
Whether assassinating critics in foreign capitals, reneging on deals with Western oil
companies, or aiding Iran with nuclear technology, Russia today is about the least
reliable of all the major powers in our brave new multipolar world.

It is not so much that Prime Minister Putin seriously believes he can reconstitute the old
Soviet Union, though some interpreted his invasion of Georgia last year in those terms.
Rather, we need to understand Russia today as an extreme case of what Marxist-
Leninists used to call "state-monopoly capitalism"—a political regime in which the
interests of monopolistic companies (in this case Gazprom and Rosneft) become
indistinguishable from the interests of the state and the elites running it.

The real question about Russian policy today is not whether Russia will invade Ukraine,
but whether Gazprom's strategy of investing in new pipelines and gas fields will pay off.
Should Gazprom focus on developing its dominant position in the European natural-gas
market? Or should the vast gas fields of Russia east of the Urals (Yamal, Arctic, Far
East) be given precedence with a view to capturing market share in China? Could
Russia one day establish an Organization of Gas Exporting Countries, modeled on the
Saudi-dominated oil cartel? Or is the simpler strategy simply to stoke trouble in the
Middle East, covertly encouraging the Iranians' nuclear ambitions until the Israelis
finally unleash airstrikes, and then reaping the rewards of a new energy price spike?

These questions themselves indicate the limited long-term significance of the Soviet
collapse of two decades ago. By comparison, the events of 10 years earlier—in 1979—
surely have a better claim to being truly historic. Just think what was happening in the
world 30 years ago. The Soviets began their policy of self-destruction by invading
Afghanistan. The British started the revival of free-market economics in the West by
electing Margaret Thatcher. Deng Xiaoping set China on a new economic course by
visiting the United States and seeing for himself what the free market can achieve. And,
of course, the Iranians ushered in the new era of clashing civilizations by overthrowing
the shah and proclaiming an Islamic Republic.

Thirty years later, each of these four events has had far more profound consequences for
the United States and the world than the events of 1989. Today it is the Americans who
now find themselves in Afghanistan, fighting the sons of the people they once armed. It
is the free-market model of Thatcher and Reagan that seems to lie in ruins, in the wake
of the biggest financial crisis since the Depression. Meanwhile, Deng's heirs are rapidly
gaining on a sluggish American hyperpower, with Goldman Sachs forecasting that
China's GDP could be the biggest in the world by 2027. Finally, the most terrifying
legacy of 1979 remains the radical Islamism that inspires not only Iran's leaders, but
also a complex and only partly visible network of terrorists and terrorist sympathizers
around the world.

In short, 1989 was less of a watershed year than 1979. The reverberations of the fall of
the Berlin Wall turned out to be much smaller than we had expected at the time. In
essence, what happened was that we belatedly saw through the gigantic fraud of Soviet
superpower. But the real trends of our time—the rise of China, the radicalization of
Islam, and the rise and fall of market fundamentalism—had already been launched a
decade earlier. Thirty years on, we are still being swept along by the historic waves of
1979. The Berlin Wall is only one of many relics of the Cold War to have been
submerged by them.

Ferguson is Laurence A. Tisch professor of history at Harvard and William Ziegler

professor at Harvard Business School. He is also a senior fellow at the Hoover
Institution, Stanford, and author of The Ascent of Money (Penguin Press), out now in
paperback.

© 2009