Maslenitsa Effigy: The “Man in Women’s Clothes” of Russia’s Pre-Lent Carnival

A cross-dressing effigy in Maslenitsa customs as described in early 20th-century accounts.

18.12.2025

Editorial team

In Russian tradition, Maslenitsa is a week of popular festivities held right before the start of Great Lent in the Orthodox calendar. Its date changes every year because it depends on Easter. Maslenitsa falls immediately before the fast and is understood as the last “well-fed” week: meat is already off the table, but dairy products, butter, and eggs are still permitted. This is where the holiday’s signature food comes from—blini (thin pancakes). They are baked from what is allowed at this time, and over the centuries they have become an instantly recognizable symbol of hospitality, merriment, and “seeing winter off.”

But Maslenitsa is not only a church “preparatory week.” It also preserves an older layer of rites whose roots reach back into pre-Christian tradition: sledding and rides, noisy processions, games, and mumming—meaning costume-play, disguise, and a temporary “turning upside down” of everyday order for the sake of laughter and collective revelry.

One of the most familiar symbols of Maslenitsa today is a straw effigy that is often burned at the end of the week. Yet it is important to remember that the idea of an effigy as an “obligatory” part of the celebration is relatively late. Ethnographic descriptions show that in many places no straw figure was made at all—in different regions of the Russian Empire people often managed perfectly well without it.

Where an effigy was made, however, it could become the centerpiece of numerous playful rituals. Usually it was made large. The base could be very simple: a cross-shaped frame of two sticks wrapped in straw, or simply a sheaf of straw. The top was shaped into a “head,” while the lower part formed the “body.” To make the figure appear taller, the sheaf might be mounted on a long pole.

After that, Maslenitsa was dressed up—and here the possibilities were many. In some places they put it in a kaftan and cap, cinched it with a sash, and even “shod” it in bast shoes. Elsewhere they chose women’s clothing: a blouse, a sarafan (traditional dress) or a skirt, and tied a kerchief around the “head.” Then the effigy was seated or set on a sleigh and taken, with songs, up to a hill. There the “meeting of Maslenitsa” took place—depending on local custom, either on Monday or on Thursday of Maslenitsa week.

Maslenitsa Man

Against this background, one particular variant stands out—one described in early 20th-century sources as “Maslenitsa Man” (Muzhik-Maslenitsa).

In theatre and popular performance, travesty is a device in which a person plays a role of another gender and dresses accordingly. Culturally speaking, what matters most here is the role and the costume: an intentional, comic “mismatch” that must be obvious to everyone and work as a joke.

The journalist and collector of folk material A. A. Korinfsky, in his book Folk Russia (1901), recounts how in earlier times, in some places, people would parade Maslenitsa itself—a figure that “for some reason… turned into a man dressed up as a woman.”

This is how the very figure of Maslenitsa Man appears: a character with rough, distinctly masculine features, yet dressed in women’s clothing—in other words, a travesty image.

He carried a balalaika, and from time to time he held a shtof of “the sovereign’s wine.” A shtof is an old term for a measured bottle or decanter; in this context “the sovereign’s wine” means vodka. Korinfsky also mentions a small keg of beer and a pancake box—a container used to transport blini, the main festive food for the entire procession. The image is assembled on purpose as one of exuberant revelry: music, food, drink, a comic costume, and an emphasized mismatch between gender and dress.

Korinfsky describes the ride itself in detail as well. “A whole train was outfitted.” At the front sped brightly decorated sleighs, and in some places even a boat set onto runners, as if it were a sleigh.

According to Korinfsky, the team might include ten to twenty horses, and on each sat a rider “with a broom in his hands.” The broom is not incidental: in Maslenitsa—and in carnival rounds more generally—it often functions as a prop of noise and mischief, and also as a symbolic gesture of “sweeping out” the old.

Maslenitsa Man himself was “hung all over with birch whisks.” In Russian culture the birch whisk evokes the bathhouse, cleansing, and a familiar “folk” texture—so it works perfectly as festive, instantly legible stage-property.

Behind the lead sleighs stretched a long line of others, crowded with dressed-up young men, girls, and children. Bells and rattles rang; balalaikas twanged; songs carried—and people ran out of their houses and chased after the train.

The foremost sleigh was called the “ship.” In some places it was decorated with brooms stuck upright and towels tied to them—so they resembled masts with sails. The “meeting” took place on Monday, the first day of Maslenitsa week, which in traditional terminology is still often called the “meeting” today.

Maslenitsa Man is not a random oddity, but a perfectly intelligible folk way of making people laugh. In old Russian festive and carnivalesque culture, figures of inversion were beloved: the high becomes low, the important becomes ridiculous, the “proper” becomes deliberately improper.

This laughter is not only about mocking someone. It is about a temporary right to step outside familiar boundaries—to feel freedom before the strict fast begins. That is why, in the street ritual, Maslenitsa can turn out to be “a man,” and moreover a man “dressed as a woman,” with a balalaika, birch whisks, and a shtof of vodka.

That is the travesty mask in a folk sense: a deliberately constructed mismatch that is immediately read as a joke—and as a sign of the festive “reversal of the world.”

🇷🇺 This piece is part of the article series “LGBT History of Russia”:

📣 Subscribe to our Telegram channel (in Russian): Urania. With Telegram Premium, you can translate posts in-app. Without it, many posts link to our website, where you can switch languages — most new articles are published in multiple languages from the start.

References and Sources

Коринфский, А. А. Народная Русь: Круглый год сказаний, поверий, обычаев и пословиц русского народа. 1901. [* Korinfsky, A. A. - Folk Russia: A Year-Round Cycle of Legends, Beliefs, Customs, and Proverbs of the Russian People.]

Tags:

Russia