Pedro Miramontes

November 7, 1941. The German army is so close to Moscow that officers can see the city's spires through their field glasses, and the Soviet capital seems about to fall. And on this morning, in the falling snow, Stalin holds a military parade in Red Square to mark the anniversary of the Revolution, and the soldiers who march past the Kremlin walls keep marching, straight out of the square and onto the trucks and out to the front line a few miles away. It is one of the great acts of defiance of the whole war. The situation was desperate. The German offensive toward Moscow had been grinding forward through the autumn, and by early November the leading German units were only a few dozen miles from the city, in places much closer. The Soviet government had evacuated many of its ministries eastward, there had been panic in the city, and it genuinely looked as though Moscow might fall, which could have knocked the Soviet Union out of the war or close to it. The 7th of November was the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, the most sacred date in the Soviet calendar, traditionally marked by a huge military parade in Red Square. Stalin decided the parade would go ahead, in the capital, on schedule, almost within earshot of the guns. It was an enormous gamble and an enormous statement. To hold the parade was to tell the Soviet people, and the world, and the Germans, that Moscow would not fall, that the government stood firm in its capital, that the Revolution and the nation endured. It was also a real risk: a parade in Red Square was an obvious target, and a single German air raid on the massed troops could have been a catastrophe and a propaganda disaster. But it came off. Heavy snow fell that morning, which hampered the Luftwaffe, and strong air defenses were in place, and no German bomber got through to the square. The troops paraded past the Kremlin, past Lenin's tomb, where Stalin stood and gave a speech invoking the heroes of Russia's past, the great commanders who had defended the motherland in earlier wars, calling on the soldiers to be worthy of them. And then, in the detail that gives the day its enduring power, the soldiers did not disperse to barracks for a holiday. They marched directly from the parade, out of Red Square, and went straight to the front, some of them into battle within hours, still in their parade formation. The effect on Soviet morale was immense. The image of the parade held in the threatened capital, the troops marching from the heart of Moscow straight to the fighting, became a symbol of the Soviet will to resist, proof that the nation would not break. It steadied nerves across the country at the darkest moment. And Moscow held. In the weeks that followed, the German offensive, exhausted, overextended, freezing in the brutal Russian winter for which it was not equipped, ground to a halt in the snow within sight of the city. And then, in early December, the Soviets launched a massive counteroffensive, throwing in fresh reserves, including divisions brought from the Far East, and drove the Germans back from the gates of Moscow. It was the first great strategic defeat of the German army, the shattering of the myth of Blitzkrieg invincibility, the moment the lightning war failed at last. The parade on the 7th, held in defiance as the enemy stood almost at the city's edge, troops marching from Red Square to the front, is remembered in Russia to this day as one of the proudest moments of the war, the symbol of a capital and a nation that refused to fall. It is still commemorated every year.