Victory Day in the USSR

At around 2.10 a.m. Moscow time on 9 May 1945 the radio announcer Yuri Levitan read out a communiqué from the Sovinformburo: in Berlin, representatives of the German high command had signed an act of unconditional surrender of the German armed forces. Immediately afterwards he read a decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR dated 8 May, which declared 9 May a “Victory Holiday” and a public holiday. The announcement was repeated throughout the night and all through the day. That was how the Soviet Union learned of the end of the war which its people called the Great Patriotic War, and which they had been fighting for almost four years, since the German attack of 22 June 1941.

The Soviet Union officially proclaimed 9 May Victory Day; the decree, signed by the Chairman of the Presidium, Mikhail Kalinin, is dated 8 May, but it was announced after midnight, together with the news of the surrender. The act at Karlshorst had been signed late in the evening of 8 May Central European Time, when it was already 9 May in Moscow. That is why the West marks the end of the war in Europe on 8 May, while Russia and most of the states of the former USSR mark it on 9 May.

Night and day in Moscow

The news, awaited ever since the surrender of Berlin on 2 May, set off spontaneous rejoicing. Despite the hour, Muscovites poured into the streets. By the morning crowds had gathered in Red Square and the streets leading to the Kremlin and – as witnesses recalled – were tossing into the air any officers in uniform they came across. People also gathered outside the United States Embassy on Manezhnaya Square, cheering the allies; the chargé d’affaires, George Kennan, addressed them from the balcony. Yet many Russians also remembered 9 May as a day of tears: almost every family had lost someone at the front, in captivity, under occupation or in the siege of Leningrad.

In the morning Order No. 369 of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief, Joseph Stalin, to the Red Army and the Navy was published. In it Stalin wrote that on 8 May in Berlin representatives of the German high command had signed the act of unconditional surrender, and that the Great Patriotic War had ended in victory. In honour of the victory, Moscow was to fire a salute of thirty salvoes from a thousand guns at 10 p.m. that evening. On the same day the medal “For the Victory over Germany in the Great Patriotic War 1941–1945” was instituted; it was later awarded to almost 15 million people.

In the evening Stalin addressed the nation on the radio. He said that the “great day of victory over Germany” had come, and that fascist Germany, brought to its knees by the Red Army and the troops of the allies, had admitted defeat. He called the act signed at Reims a “preliminary protocol of surrender” and recognised the Berlin act as the proper one. He noted that some German forces, especially in Czechoslovakia, were not yet obeying the order to surrender. He also gave an assurance that the Soviet Union “celebrates victory, although it does not intend either to dismember or to destroy Germany”. At 10 p.m. the salvoes of the salute thundered over Moscow, and the sky was lit up by anti-aircraft searchlights and flares.

The war goes on

Although Moscow was celebrating, the fighting in the south had not ended. In Bohemia and Moravia Field Marshal Ferdinand Schörner’s Army Group Centre was trying to break through to the west so as to go into captivity with the Americans rather than the Russians. On the morning of 9 May tanks of Marshal Ivan Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front rolled into Prague, where an uprising had been under way since 5 May. The Prague offensive did not end until 11 May, and in Yugoslavia and Austria isolated German units fought on for even longer. For many Soviet soldiers killed in those days, Victory Day turned out to be a nominal date.

The price of victory was enormous. In 1945 no one in the USSR gave the number of victims publicly. In 1946 Stalin spoke of about 7 million dead, and in 1961 Nikita Khrushchev of more than 20 million. Estimates published at the end of the Soviet Union’s existence and just after its collapse speak of some 26–27 million Soviet citizens dead, including some 8.7 million soldiers killed or dead according to the team led by General Grigori Krivosheev. These figures comprised the victims of the fighting, of captivity, of famine, of the occupation, of the extermination of the Soviet Jews and of the occupier’s mass repression.

From salute to parade

The celebrations culminated in the Victory Parade in Red Square on 24 June 1945. The parade was reviewed by Marshal Georgy Zhukov and commanded by Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky. Regiments representing all the fronts marched past, and at the end soldiers threw captured German standards at the foot of Lenin’s Mausoleum. A contingent of the Polish Army, led by Lieutenant General Władysław Korczyc, marched in the column of the 1st Belorussian Front.

The holiday itself, however, had a chequered history in the USSR. For the first three years 9 May was a day off work, but a decree of 23 December 1947 turned it back into a working day. Historians link this to the policy of Stalin, who was curbing the public role of veterans and of the victorious marshals – Zhukov had already been sidelined to provincial commands in 1946. For the next twenty years the anniversary was marked modestly: with salutes, commemorative gatherings and meetings of veterans. Only in 1965, on the twentieth anniversary of the victory, did Leonid Brezhnev’s leadership restore the day off and the parade in Red Square, and 9 May became one of the most important state holidays in the USSR. In 1967 the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier was unveiled beneath the Kremlin wall. In Russia, Belarus and some of the other states that emerged from the collapse of the USSR, 9 May has remained the main day of remembrance of the war.

Poland: the Holiday of Victory and Freedom

The date of 9 May came to Poland together with the Soviet calendar. On 8 May 1945 the Council of Ministers of the Provisional Government met in Warsaw, with the chairman of the State National Council (KRN), Bolesław Bierut, taking part. According to surviving accounts several dates were considered – Marshal Michał Rola-Żymierski proposed 8 May, the government 10 May – but in the end a decree approved by the KRN established 9 May as the National Holiday of Victory and Freedom, in line with the Soviet date. Until 1950 it was a day off work; a law of 1951 abolished the day off, although the holiday itself remained and was celebrated with ceremony in the Polish People’s Republic, with parades and commemorative gatherings.

For many Poles, however, May 1945 was not only a time of joy. The war with Germany was over, but the country remained under Moscow’s control, the NKVD was arresting underground soldiers, and the sixteen leaders of the Polish Underground State, seized near Warsaw in March, were awaiting in Moscow the trial that took place in June. This uncertainty had already clouded the joy the day before, when the West celebrated Victory in Europe Day. The name of the holiday, linking victory with freedom, therefore aroused mixed feelings for decades. After 1989, 9 May formally remained a state holiday, but it was marked ever more modestly. In 2015, on the 70th anniversary of the end of the war, the Sejm abolished it and replaced it with a National Victory Day held on 8 May, as in most European countries.

Significance

The decree of 8 May and the celebrations of the following day closed, for the USSR, a war that had been the hardest trial in its history. The Red Army, which in 1941 had fallen back to the gates of Moscow, stood in 1945 in Berlin, Vienna and Prague, and Stalin’s state emerged from the war as one of the two greatest powers in the world, dominating the whole of Central and Eastern Europe. From then on, victory over Germany became the foundation of its legitimacy – including in the eyes of nations for which liberation from German occupation had not brought sovereignty.

Formally, the USSR did not make peace with Germany. The state of war with Germany was ended only by a decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of 25 January 1955. In the Far East, meanwhile, the war went on: in keeping with the promise made at the Yalta Conference, the Soviet Union was to enter the war against Japan three months after Germany’s surrender, in August 1945.