The winter in St. Petersburg was as cold as ever. Though the sun occasionally peeked out, everyone knew it was just for show, merely a reminder that spring hadn't frozen to death yet.
However, no matter how cold the weather was, it couldn't dampen people's enthusiasm for the Maslenitsa festival.
Although Maslenitsa is usually held in the week before the Eastern Orthodox Lent (40 days before Easter), in reality, it's not an Eastern Orthodox holiday but a traditional Slavic festival, one of Russia's oldest folk festivals.
Before the arrival of Eastern Orthodoxy, Maslenitsa was an agricultural celebration in pagan Russia, marking the natural cycle of the end of winter and the arrival of spring, so you could also consider it as Russia's version of the Spring Festival.
