Very cool; I'd heard about it, but had never actually seen it.  There has been a lot of interesting animation from Russia over the years.  At the side of that is another cartoon listed, THE SNOW MAN, which they list as 1932.  I've seen that one mentioned elsewhere (I think it's from Paul Terry's studio), but I'm pretty sure it came out later than that.  That poster has put together a great collection of holiday shorts online:  http://www.youtube.com/XmasFLIX