The famous 1941 parade in Moscow was a turning point in the battle for the city. Soviet troops retreated to the capital for several months, and the situation became critical. For the army and all the people who worked in the rear, a spirit-raising holiday was necessary.
Moscow in the fall of 1941
The day of November 7 was not chosen by chance. This date is the anniversary of the October Revolution - the main holiday of the entire Soviet Union. In 1941 was the 24th anniversary of the events in Petrograd, when the Winter Palace was taken under the volley of Aurora. And in past peaceful years, government events dedicated to this event were filled with ideology.
In 1941, this promise was necessary, like air. The enemy was not far from the capital, and most of the inhabitants had already been evacuated to the rear. Nevertheless, the party leadership remained in the Kremlin. The 1941 parade in Moscow could not have passed without the military and state leaders of the Soviet Union.
The organizers of the event understood that this would not be just a demonstration of equipment and a march of soldiers. Prepared teams of operators who were supposed to film an unprecedented action. Based on these materials, propaganda films were later mounted that were shown both at the front and in the rear.
Start of preparations
Preparations for the parade began in late October, when Moscow was already under siege. The streets were dug and filled with fortifications. From the 16th there was a mass evacuation of civilians to the east. The stations were besieged by disgruntled and frightened residents, someone could not find relatives. The state of minds in the capital was the most depressed.
In order to put an end to these sentiments, Stalin on October 24 met with Pavel Artemyev (commander of the troops in the Moscow military district), as well as Pavel Zhigarev (commander of the air force). They had to prepare everything necessary for the upcoming holiday, while not violating the regime of secrecy.
Moscow Council meeting
The parade on Red Square on November 7, 1941 in Moscow remained secret until the anniversary of the October Revolution. In peacetime, on the eve of the holiday, according to tradition, they held a meeting of the Moscow Soviet, which was one of the most informal. It took place at the Bolshoi Theater. However, the building of this cultural institution was already mined in case the Germans appeared in the city. Therefore, we decided to hold a festive session right on the platform of the underground metro station. At Mayakovskaya a table and chairs were prepared for senior officials of the Soviet state.
Stalin was supposed to appear there, who, as a rule, delivered an annual speech. There were rumors in the city that the entire party leadership had long left the city and moved to Kuibyshev, which was to become the new capital in the event of the fall of Moscow. However, Stalin still appeared on Mayakovskaya. He wanted to announce to the members of the Politburo that the next day should be a military parade of the Red Army. November 7, 1941 was a public holiday, but no one knew what would happen in Moscow at this alarming time.
Until the day of the meeting of the Moscow Soviet, Stalin tried to avoid public speaking. Even the famous appeal to the inhabitants of the Soviet Union at the very beginning of the war was read out not by him, but by Molotov. However, on November 6, the situation was already such that further retreat would be considered a sign of weakness.
Stalin understood this. He gave a speech to the political elite, in which he tried to explain the reasons for the defeats of the first months of the war. The Secretary General of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks and the People’s Commissar of Defense announced the lack of tanks and new aviation. This speech was also broadcast on the radio, and then was printed on numerous leaflets.
The night before
At the end of the meeting, Stalin secretly announced to the members of the Politburo that the 1941 parade would be held in Moscow the next day. For all those gathered this news was a complete surprise. Later (at night) the commanders of the units who were supposed to participate in the march on Red Square found out about this. But the parade also had to have a civilian audience. They collected it with the help of trade unions, representatives of factories and other enterprises. They all received an invitation to the parade in the morning. Conspiracy was associated with a legitimate fear that information about the event would leak into the camp of the enemy. Most of all, the organizers were afraid of German aviation, which could bomb the parade on November 7, 1941 in Moscow. To confuse the Wehrmacht, on the eve of the event, the start time of the entry into Red Square was postponed (from 10 to 8 in the morning).
On the 6th, weather forecasters reported that the next day the clouds would be low and dense, and they also promised snowfall. This made bombing impossible. In addition, the air forces of the USSR on the eve of a special operation, attacking the enemy airfields, which were in close proximity to the front. All these measures calmed the party leadership: the parade in November 1941 in Moscow was to be held without casualties and unnecessary events for the country's image.
Red Square Preparation
The besieged Moscow looked a little like a peaceful city in which a holiday should take place. Red Square was no exception . In October, everything that could have been destroyed by enemy aircraft was removed from it. A special concern of the city authorities was the Lenin Mausoleum, which can not be transferred in any way, but left as it is - even more so. Therefore, the structure was camouflaged with special camouflage. These measures were effective - during the German bombing, the mausoleum was not damaged.
On the night before the parade was to be held on November 7, 1941 in Moscow, Stalin ordered that the disguise concealing this ideologically important building be removed. In addition, as an exception, they lit red stars on the spiers of the Kremlin. All this was done for the sole purpose - to show that, despite the war and the approach of the enemy, in the capital everything was exactly the same as in peacetime, and the defenders of the city did not lose heart.
Parade start
On November 7, at 8 a.m., the 1941 parade began in Moscow. Pavel Artemyev, who was also responsible for the preliminary organization of the event, commanded them. The troops took Semyon Budyonny. In the Soviet Army, it was a legendary figure. One of the first five marshals, he went through a civil war, survived the great terror in the army and remained at the very top of the state. The country's leadership was stationed on Lenin's mausoleum, which had just got rid of camouflage.
Artillery cadets marched first on Red Square. They were followed by soldiers from infantry units. The silence in the city center was interrupted by the music of military marches performed by the orchestra of the Ministry of the Interior under the direction of the famous conductor Vasily Agapkin. Even in the tsarist army, he wrote the epoch-making “Farewell of the Slav”.
Next came the sailors and anti-aircraft gunners. Following these units, cavalry, machine gun carts, as well as tanks, including the T-34 model, which became a symbol of the whole war and Soviet victories, moved on. The parade in November 1941 in Moscow was an unprecedented spectacle. Never before had it been held in such conditions. Subject to strict conspiracy, units from Arkhangelsk and Murmansk arrived in the capital (they were reserve tank battalions).
Stalin's speech
The military parade on 1941 Red Square in Moscow was marked by a speech by Stalin, although this was contrary to tradition (as a rule, it was delivered by the host parade). In his speech, the People's Commissar of Defense compared the Soviet troops with the armies of past generations, led by such commanders as Alexander Nevsky, Dmitry Donskoy, Alexander Suvorov, etc.
Stalin turned to the Russian past, but the success of resistance to the enemy was primarily connected with the Lenin case. Communist ideals were supposed to break the Nazis, who attacked the Soviet Union without declaring war, treacherously destroying cities and killing civilians.
Security measures
In order for Stalin to be able to read his speech, the organizers had to take unprecedented security measures. All soldiers who participated in the parade were deprived of ammunition. The equipment rode along the cobblestones of Red Square without shells. Management was afraid of sabotage and betrayal. One way or another, but everything went according to plan, and no emergency situations have arisen.
There were no German air raids that could spoil the 1941 military parade in Moscow. Photos of marching soldiers were immediately sent to all Soviet newspapers. An unprecedented propaganda campaign has begun to raise the morale of soldiers at the front and working people in the rear. An unprecedented feature of the parade was that the units that took part in it immediately went west to repulse the Germans. The enemy was already tens of kilometers from the capital, so the soldiers were at the front the very next day.
Value
So the 1941 parade was held in Moscow. Photos of this unprecedented event became a symbol of the stubborn resistance of the inhabitants of the USSR to the fascist threat. Despite the organizational mistakes of the leadership at the beginning of the war, a month after the march of soldiers on Red Square (December 5), the famous counterattack began, which threw the Wehrmacht back to the west.
A very important contribution to this first strategic victory was the 1941 military parade in Moscow. Contemporaries of those events left numerous memoirs and memories of how people, having learned about the events on Red Square, were inspired and again accepted for the struggle against the Nazis. The 1941 parade did all this. Moscow soon got rid of the bombing, and the city began to return to peaceful life.