Unfinished Victory
Ukraine is fighting for what was left undone in 1945
(Marshal Zhukov arriving on Red Square on June 24th, 1945 riding Kumir (‘Idol’), a stallion from the NKVD cavalry division)
(Continued from our previous essay)
Stalin himself seems to have been almost embarrassed by the war’s legacy. Nervous about the prestige and power of the Red army in general and Marshal Zhukov in particular, he delayed a victory parade on Red Square until June 24th, 1945.
During Stalin’s remaining years in power and those of his successor Nikita Khrushchev, no parade was held on Red Square on May 9th.
They understood that the Soviet ‘victory’ had only emerged gradually and awkwardly from a series of unimaginable horrors. The war’s early disasters had made the atrocities of Russia’s civil war seem quaint by comparison.
Decimated by Stalin’s unrelenting purges in the 1930s, the Soviet army was totally unprepared in June 1941 for Hitler’s onslaught, which sliced quickly through all of Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic states, as well as the most populated areas of European Russia, to reach the Volga and Caucasus in the south. In the north, Nazi forces encircled Leningrad, which was brutally starved into near-submission.
The Nazis raised their flag on Mount Elbrus, the highest peak in Europe, on August 21st, 1942. By November, they had taken the city of Vladikavkaz.
Soviet forces suffered hideous defeats. To keep soldiers from deserting en masse, cruelly efficient disciplinary units under NKVD control murdered an estimated one million Soviet servicemen.
This uncomfortable history was of course ruthlessly suppressed.
But the reality was clear to tens of millions of eyewitnesses who survived. When the Red army advanced, it left devastation, famine and sexual violence in its wake. Astonishing numbers of Ukrainians, Belarusians, Latvians, Estonians, Lithuanians, Poles and others nevertheless took up arms to oppose or resist Soviet forces, knowing conquest by Moscow would only mean a new subjugation.
For all of these reasons, full Soviet military parades took place on Red Square after 1945 only on three occasions, all major anniversaries, in 1965, 1985 and 1990.
It was only after the collapse of the Soviet Union that May 9th ‘victory day’ parades on Red Square became an annual event.
