🇷🇺 Russia
Unity Day, known in Russian as День народного единства, is a national holiday in Russia held on 4 November. It commemorates the popular uprising that ended the Polish-Lithuanian occupation of Moscow in 1612 and, more broadly, the close of the Time of Troubles.
Unity Day is a public holiday in Russia, observed on 4 November each year. The date corresponds to 22 October in the old Julian calendar. It is also the feast day of the Russian Orthodox icon of Our Lady of Kazan, so the day carries a religious dimension alongside its civic one. The holiday is also known as National Unity Day and the Day of People's Unity, and in the Russian Federation it has been marked on this date since 2005.
The holiday looks back to a moment when Russia had neither a tsar nor a patriarch to guide it, and people from all classes of society joined together to preserve the state. That idea of cross-class cooperation gives the day its name. In 1613 Tsar Mikhail Romanov instituted a holiday for Moscow's liberation from Polish invaders, and it was celebrated in the Russian Empire until 1917. The Soviet-era revolution commemoration then replaced it, and the 1612 events returned to the calendar in 2005.
Unity Day sits in the early-November slot once occupied by the anniversary of the 1917 revolution. During the 1990s that 7 November date was known as the Day of Accord and Reconciliation, so the calendar has carried three very different commemorations in a few decades. The current holiday shifts attention from the revolution to events from the early seventeenth century.
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