It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway: Russia and the Communist Past by Satter David

Author:Satter, David [Satter, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2011-12-13T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

History

On November 7, 1941, with German units fifty miles away and the fate of the city hanging in the balance, preparations were completed in almost total secrecy for the annual Revolution Day parade in Moscow’s Red Square. Most of the participating commanders received their instructions at 2 A.M., only a few hours before they had to muster their troops. At 8 A.M., the parade began. Stalin and the other Soviet leaders stood atop the Lenin mausoleum; General Budenny rode out on a white stallion from the Spassky Gate and saluted. He was followed by T-34 tanks and columns of troops. In driving snow and wind, the troops marched through Red Square and then out of the city directly to the front.

The effect of the parade on Soviet morale was dramatic. Word spread quickly that, despite rumors, Stalin had not left Moscow. Soldiers at the front, told about the parade by soldiers who had just participated in it, were awed by what they heard.

The parade became a legend in Russia, a symbol of patriotic defiance in the face of mortal danger. On November 7, 2007, Moscow marked the ninetieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution by honoring not the revolution but the parade. Several thousand military cadets dressed in World War II uniforms marched through Red Square, as did the cavalry group of the presidential regiment and more than three thousand Moscow schoolchildren and pupils of the Moscow military-musical academy. From the tribune, a large group of elderly war veterans looked on, sixty-five of whom had taken part in the parade of 1941.

Mayor Yuri Luzhkov said that the parade inspired the battle for Moscow, the most important battle of the war. “The leadership of the country in that tragic period,” he said, “made the decision to hold the parade on Red Square, and from there, military units left for the front. We gained the first, the most significant, and the most important victory in the battle for Moscow. This is the universal significance of the parade on Red Square on November 7, 1941.”1

The decision to celebrate the anniversary of the parade was Russia’s answer to a delicate problem. Sixteen years earlier, the Soviet regime had ceased to exist. It therefore made no sense to celebrate the anniversary of the revolution. Russians, however, had grown up with the November 7 holiday. In the 1990s the day was renamed the Day of Accord and Reconciliation. But no one could say with what they were in accord and with whom they needed to be reconciled. In 2005 Putin eliminated November 7 as a holiday, but in deference to the custom of having a day of in early November, he created a new holiday on November 4, People’s Unity Day, to celebrate the expulsion of the Polish invaders from Moscow in 1612. There remained, however, an unspoken wish to mark November 7 as people always had. This led to the decision to celebrate the parade. In effect, Moscow celebrated the sixty-sixth anniversary of the twenty-fourth anniversary of the revolution.

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