Celebrating religious holidays was in the core of religiosity of rural Central Russia. Before the Revolution, the holidays contained a tension between the strict following of church calendar and the specific local sacral rhythm and collective memory. The paper explores the changes in the Soviet times, in particular in the postwar period until the early 1960s, when the tradition underwent a deep transformation. The paper draws upon the documents of the state Council of the Russian Orthodox Church, Party and local institutions, Komsomol, as well as the ethnographic data.