Stalin’s speech of 6 November

On the evening of 6 November 1941, on the eve of the 24th anniversary of the October Revolution, Joseph Stalin delivered a report to a ceremonial session of the Moscow Soviet with the city’s party and public organisations. The session was held not, as every year, in the Bolshoi Theatre, but on the platform of the Mayakovskaya metro station, dozens of metres underground, because the front stood a few dozen kilometres from the city and German aircraft regularly appeared over the capital. The next morning, 7 November, Stalin stood on the reviewing stand of Lenin’s Mausoleum and took the traditional parade on Red Square. Some of the units that marched past the stand went straight from the square to the front. Two addresses in less than twenty-four hours, broadcast on the radio and printed in the press, were meant to convince the country and the world that Moscow would not surrender and that its leaders had not fled.

Many war chronologies claim that on this day Stalin addressed the nation “only for the second time in thirty years of rule”, the first time having been on 2 July. This needs two corrections. Stalin’s first wartime radio address took place on 3 July, not 2 July. Nor is it true that before the war Stalin never spoke to the country at all: his speeches at party and Soviet congresses, such as his report on the draft constitution in November 1936, were broadcast on the radio and printed in the press. It is true, however, that he rarely spoke in public, and the report of 6 November was his second major address since the beginning of the war with Germany. The figures for German losses that Stalin cited on that occasion were a gross exaggeration.

The city before the anniversary

The anniversary fell at the worst possible moment for Moscow. At the beginning of October the Germans had launched Operation Typhoon and in the Vyazma and Bryansk pockets had destroyed most of the forces defending the road to the capital. In mid-October, after the decision to evacuate the government and the diplomatic corps to Kuibyshev (Samara), Moscow was gripped by panic, and on 19 October the State Defence Committee declared a state of siege in the city. At the end of October the fighting on the Mozhaisk Line and the autumn thaw halted the German advance 70–100 kilometres from the Kremlin. In the south General Heinz Guderian’s 2nd Panzer Army was stuck outside Tula, and at the very beginning of November the Germans took Kursk. Everyone knew that as soon as the ground froze, Field Marshal Fedor von Bock’s Army Group Centre would strike again.

Stalin stayed in Moscow. According to Russian studies, as early as 24 October he instructed the commander of the Moscow Military District, Lieutenant General Pavel Artemyev (PL), and the commander of the air force, Lieutenant General Pavel Zhigarev, to prepare a parade, in secret even from those who would take part in it. Some commanders regarded it as an unnecessary risk. According to the memoirs of General of the Army Georgy Zhukov, commander of the Western Front, Stalin asked him at the beginning of November whether the situation at the front allowed for celebrations; Zhukov replied that in the next few days the Germans were not ready for a major offensive, and advised strengthening the city’s air defences. The plan of the parade was approved on 31 October, and the band, made up of several military ensembles, was conducted by Vasily Agapkin, composer of the march “Farewell of Slavianka”.

The session in the metro

Mayakovskaya station, opened in 1938 and regarded as one of the most beautiful in the Moscow Metro, and in everyday use an air-raid shelter, was turned into a hall for about two thousand people. Chairs and a rostrum were set up on the platform, and a buffet and cloakroom were installed in the carriages of a train standing at the platform. According to accounts, Stalin and the members of the Politburo arrived by train from the direction of Belorusskaya station. The session was broadcast on the radio, and the official part was followed by a concert at which the tenor Ivan Kozlovsky and the bass Maxim Mikhailov, among others, sang.

The report began with a reminder that anniversary sessions usually reviewed the achievements of peaceful construction, whereas this time four months of war had to be reviewed. Stalin admitted that the danger had not diminished but grown: the enemy had seized the greater part of Ukraine, Belarus, Moldavia and the Baltic states, had broken into the Donbas, “hung like a black cloud” over Leningrad and was threatening Moscow. Then he gave figures. According to him, in four months the Red Army had lost 350,000 killed and 378,000 missing, and had 1,020,000 wounded. The enemy, he claimed, had lost in the same period “more than four and a half million men in killed, wounded and prisoners”.

Stalin then declared that the German plan of “lightning war” had failed. The Germans, he said, had counted on three things: that they would draw Britain and the United States into a joint crusade against the USSR – which was why Rudolf Hess was supposed to have flown to Scotland, his flight of May 1941 being presented by Stalin as a mission sent by the leadership of the Reich – on the collapse of the Soviet home front, and on the weakness of the Red Army. All three calculations had failed. He named two causes of the “temporary reverses”: the absence of a second front in Europe, which allowed the Germans to throw all their forces east together with the troops of Finland, Romania, Italy and Hungary, and a shortage of tanks and, in part, of aircraft. This was Stalin’s first public call for the opening of a second front; until then he had demanded it in his correspondence with Winston Churchill. Such a front, he assured his audience, “must unquestionably appear in the near future”.

Stalin devoted a separate passage to the question of who the “National Socialists” were. He denied them the right to either half of the name: the Hitlerites were no longer nationalists but imperialists, and they had nothing in common with socialism, having destroyed the trade unions, the workers’ parties and parliament. He likened Hitler’s regime to the tsarist one, which had also organised “medieval pogroms of the Jews”. In doing so he cited alleged statements by Adolf Hitler and Hermann Göring about exterminating the Slavs and about the “chimera of conscience”; some of them came from the book by Hermann Rauschning, the former President of the Senate of the Free City of Danzig, whose reliability historians now seriously question. Alongside them he quoted German orders captured at the front that called for killing without mercy. From this he drew the sentence that became the most often repeated passage of the report: “If the Germans want a war of extermination, they shall have it.” The task of the peoples of the USSR was henceforth to be the extermination of “all Germans, to the last man”, who had invaded Soviet soil as occupiers. The slogan “Death to the German occupiers!” soon appeared on the mastheads of many Soviet newspapers.

Hitler, who was being compared to Napoleon, resembled Napoleon, Stalin said, “no more than a kitten resembles a lion”. He named three factors that would decide Germany’s defeat: the instability of the “new order” in occupied Europe, the instability of the German home front, and the coalition of the USSR, Britain and the United States. “Modern war is a war of engines,” he said, and the three powers together had at least a threefold superiority over Germany in producing them. He mentioned the Moscow Conference attended by Lord Beaverbrook and Averell Harriman, British deliveries of aluminium, lead, tin, nickel and rubber, and the American loan of a billion dollars. Finally he gave assurances that the USSR had no war aims such as the seizure of foreign lands or imposing its will on “the Slav and other enslaved peoples of Europe”, Iran included, and that after the war it would let them order their affairs as they wished. Coming from a leader who two years earlier had partitioned Poland together with Hitler and annexed the Baltic states to the USSR, this sounded equivocal; in London and Washington, however, the declaration was welcomed.

Stalin’s figures and reality

The figures given in the metro had little to do with reality – in both directions. According to research by the team of General Grigoriy Krivosheev, based on declassified General Staff documents, the irrecoverable losses of the Red Army and Navy – killed, died of wounds, missing and taken prisoner – amounted to more than 2.1 million men between 22 June and the end of September 1941, and to some 3.1 million by the end of the year. The Wehrmacht alone reported taking more than 3 million Red Army soldiers prisoner by the end of 1941, most of whom died of hunger, disease and cold or were murdered in prisoner-of-war camps. The figure of 728,000 killed and missing was therefore understated several times over; only the number of wounded came closer to the truth, and even that did not include everyone.

Stalin inflated the German losses even more. According to the returns of the Army High Command, recorded in the diary of its chief of staff, General Franz Halder, German forces in the east lost a total of about 740,000 killed, wounded and missing by the end of November 1941, and total losses passed a million only in February 1942. “Four and a half million” was thus six times the true figure. Even so, this was a very serious loss for Germany – Halder noted in November that they would never again have an army such as they had had in June – but not enough for the Reich to be “bleeding to death”, as Stalin claimed.

The false figures were no accidental error. They were meant to support the claim that Germany was closer to exhaustion than the USSR and that the retreats were only temporary. The Soviet authorities never revealed the true losses in Stalin’s lifetime: in 1946 Stalin spoke of 7 million dead in the whole war, whereas the USSR’s actual human losses are now estimated at about 26–27 million.

The parade of 7 November

Members of the leadership and the commanders learned of the parade only after the session in the metro, and unit commanders late in the evening. To make an air raid harder, its start was moved from the traditional 10 a.m. to 8 a.m. The weather helped: in the morning heavy snow was falling, the clouds hung low and the Luftwaffe did not come. For the same reason the planned fly-past of several hundred aircraft was cancelled. The parade was commanded by Lieutenant General Artemyev and taken by Marshal Semyon Budyonny, who rode out on horseback from the Spassky Gate. On the mausoleum stand next to Stalin stood, among others, Vyacheslav Molotov, Lavrentiy Beria and the secretary of the Moscow party organisation, Alexander Shcherbakov.

The speech at the parade was usually delivered by the People’s Commissar for Defence or the marshal taking the parade. This time Stalin spoke himself, and according to Russian historians it was his first speech from the stand during a parade. It was short. He recalled 1918, when three-quarters of the country was in the hands of the interventionists and the Red Army was only just being formed, yet the Bolsheviks had won. He repeated that the Germans had lost four and a half million soldiers and declared: “A few more months, another half-year, perhaps a year – and Hitlerite Germany must burst under the weight of its crimes.” Best remembered was the ending, in which, instead of revolutionaries, he invoked “the manly image of our great ancestors”: Alexander Nevsky, Dmitry Donskoy, Kuzma Minin, Dmitry Pozharsky, Alexander Suvorov and Mikhail Kutuzov – princes, an Orthodox saint, a merchant, tsarist generals – and only after them “the victorious banner of the great Lenin”. For Poles part of this pantheon had a bitter ring: Minin and Pozharsky had driven the Polish garrison out of the Kremlin in 1612, and in 1794 Suvorov had stormed Praga, the suburb of Warsaw on the right bank of the Vistula.

According to Russian tallies, some 28,500 soldiers marched across the square: cadets of military schools, regiments of an NKVD division, the 332nd Rifle Division, units of the Moscow people’s militia, sailors, cavalry and tachankas, about 140 guns and – depending on the source – between 160 and 200 tanks, including heavy KVs and T-34s. The parade lasted a little over an hour. Many units, the tanks among them, left the square in the direction of the front, which then lay a few dozen kilometres to the west and north-west. On the same day parades were held in Kuibyshev, where Marshal Kliment Voroshilov took the salute in the presence of the diplomats evacuated there, and in Voronezh, where it was taken by Marshal Semyon Timoshenko. According to Russian studies, the Kuibyshev parade, commanded by Lieutenant General Maxim Purkayev, was meant to replace the Moscow one had the latter had to be cancelled.

Film and propaganda

The newsreel cameramen managed to film the parade, but did not record Stalin’s speech from the stand – according to the account of one of them, the sound crew arrived too late. The leadership nevertheless considered the speech too important to leave out. At the end of November it was re-staged in one of the halls of the Grand Kremlin Palace, in a set imitating the mausoleum stand. Attentive viewers later noticed that in this version no breath could be seen, although there had been a frost on the square. The footage was included in the documentary on the Battle of Moscow which, in its American version (Moscow Strikes Back), won an Oscar in 1943.

Both addresses were printed in Pravda, and the text of the report was dropped from aircraft in leaflets over the occupied territories. In the West the parade was seen as proof that the USSR had no intention of capitulating; the London News Chronicle wrote of a “splendid example of courage and bravery”. That same day, 7 November, Franklin Delano Roosevelt formally declared the defence of the USSR vital to the security of the United States, which opened full access to Lend-Lease for Moscow.

Place in the war

The speeches of 6 and 7 November are among the canonical texts of the Soviet history of the war and are firmly embedded in the image of the Battle of Moscow. They consolidated the shift that had begun on 3 July: the war was now presented not as a class struggle but as a patriotic war, in which the Russian people and their heroes of old stood alongside Lenin. In 1942 the Orders of Alexander Nevsky, Suvorov and Kutuzov were instituted, and in 1943 the state came to terms with the Orthodox Church. The call for a “war of extermination” against the occupiers became the basis of a propaganda of hatred most forcefully expressed by Ilya Ehrenburg. Stalin himself, in his order of 23 February 1942, added the qualification that “Hitlers come and go, but the German people, the German state, remains”.

The predictions that Germany would “burst” within six months or a year did not come true. On 15 November Army Group Centre resumed its advance on Moscow, and at the beginning of December its spearheads stood some 30 kilometres from the Kremlin. On 5 and 6 December the Red Army went over to the counter-offensive and threw the Germans back from the capital, but the war went on for another three and a half years. The second front, which Stalin first demanded publicly in the metro, became for years the main subject of disputes with the Allies; the Normandy landings came only in June 1944. The declaration of non-interference in the affairs of the Slav nations already formed the background to Stalin’s talks with General Władysław Sikorski in Moscow in December 1941, and its worth was shown in 1944–1945, when the Red Army entered Poland. Stalin also delivered reports on the eve of the revolution’s anniversary in 1942, 1943 and 1944, and the parade of 7 November 1941 became in the USSR, and later in Russia, one of the most powerful symbols of the war: since 2005 its anniversary has been one of Russia’s Days of Military Glory.