Parades, Celebrations, & Holidays
The U.S. embassy on Mokhovaya Street provided American diplomats and service attachés with a front-row seat to the two largest official Soviet celebrations of the year—7 November and May Day.
The military would practice for the 7 November parade for weeks in advance, usually at night until the early hours of the morning, directly in front of the embassy. “Massed bands, infantry, artillery, tanks, more massed bands and more tanks, were impressive,” wrote U.S. naval attaché Leslie C. Stevens in 1949. “The cavalry made a brave sight, particularly a troop of white horses with red banners.” Less impressive, he noted, were the women following the horses with their brooms, cleaning up the manure.
Lydia Kirk, the wife of Ambassador Alan Kirk, wrote on the night of 6 November 1949:
“The streets are crowded with soldiers brought in to take part in the great parades, and late in the evening there are big civilian groups in front of our Mokhovaya building, marching back and forth across the Square, training for the ‘spontaneous demonstration,’ with cheer leaders coaching them who would put our college men to shame.”
All the streets leading to Red Square were closed by 9:30 on the morning of 7 November. About that time the ambassador, his wife, and several service attachés, both American and from a few of the other Western embassies, would cross Manege Square and take their places on the viewing stand on Red Square.
When the Kremlin clock struck 10 o’clock, the members of the Politburo came out and mounted the stairs to the top of the Lenin mausoleum. Guns boomed and a band struck up the Soviet national anthem. Then the military and troops began to march, accompanied by marshal music of various bands. Mrs. Kirk found the “sound of the boots striking the stone pavement is chilling.”
The way they marched reminded her of the Nazi goosestep; the soldiers stomped their feet so hard “the men’s cheeks shake.” The soldiers marched, the cavalry strutted, the motorized divisions thundered, and the air force flew overhead, as all the while bands played on and on. She could not help but noticing that “the music throughout was excellent.”
The military presentation lasted a full seventy-five minutes, after which came the civilian marchers. The Kirks left after thirty minutes of this, even though the marchers kept on coming. With the help of the ambassador’s four Soviet bodyguards, the couple managed to squeeze their way through the crowds and return to the embassy. As they went, some in the crowd jeered at the ambassador in his formal morning dress and top hat.
All of the apartments facing Mokhovaya were crowded with people watching the spectacle. The apartments’ occupants held open house for the entire day, providing drinks and food. And it wasn’t just Americans. Since the U.S. had the best embassy, a great many foreign diplomats would come by to watch as well.
By mid-afternoon, the “people’s demonstration,” as Lydia Kirk called it, was over, but everyone remained at the embassy to watch the crowds later in the evening dancing in the streets below and the searchlight and fireworks’ display. It was one big party for everyone, participants and spectators.
Stevens recalled how on the last day of April 1948, red banners and flags went up all over Moscow and loud-speakers broadcast music in the streets. The morning of 1 May, all motor traffic stopped at 7am. The night before, the entire Manege Square filled with “battery after battery of mechanized guns, their crews strolling back and forth waiting their turn to enter their places in the parade.”
Once they had reached Red Square, two or three big military bands played and marched past, and then Stalin and the rest of Politburo and about a dozen high-ranking military men ascended Lenin’s tomb, followed by a long line of buglers playing a fanfare to signal the official start to the festivities: “May Day of the Workers and Their Armed Strength.” Stevens liked what he saw.
It was an impressive show. The military academies and schools, from the little Suvorov lads to the middle-aged staff officers of the Frunze War College, came near the head, followed by all branches of the regular services.
Motorized guns of all descriptions, mortars, field pieces, machine guns, antitank guns, big, complicated rocket projectors, huge guns like naval rifles, howitzers, giant mortars, and troops of all sorts moved past with precision. The jowls of the foot troops shook with each stamp of their goose step as they went by.
The naval troops, with fixed bayonets, were particularly smart, and all the Soviet generals and admirals turned to look when the foreign naval attachés clapped and cheered as they came along. There were hundreds and hundreds of paratroopers, who looked particularly tough and murderous with their sunburned faces outlined by their helmets.
When a long line of horse artillery, with beautiful prancing, cream-colored horses went by, old Budënny on top of the tomb put on his own demonstration of clapping and cheering, for the horses are of course his favorites.
Next, about three hundred planes flew low overhead, about a third of them jets. These were followed by scores of tanks, including the “new Josef Stalins, which,” Stevens noted, “all the military attachés say is the best tank the world has yet produced.”
He could see Stalin, Beria, Malenkov and the other Party leaders watching from atop the mausoleum; from time to time, Stalin would disappear, likely to rest, and then return all animated, “waving and pointing emphatically to some slogan or emblem in the parade that particularly pleased him.”
The civilian half of the parade Stevens found monotonous, if at least “infinite in its variations.” He estimated over a million people must have taken part in it, massive, surging columns, sometimes eighteen persons abreast, all “shouting and cheering, sweating and smiling, with no pretense of military order, but always moving and flowing like a great river—the representatives of factories, bureaus, institutions, trades.
As far as the eye could see in both directions, hour after hour, was a great sea of scarlet flags, banners, big portraits of Lenin, Marx, Stalin, and the Politburo, slogans of Russian words white against red backgrounds, emblems, hand-borne floats, fantastic spiral streamers, and sprays of paper flowers that at times made the place seem like a spring orchard of dogwood trees or cherry blossoms. [...] the mass effect was overwhelming.”
Loud speakers boomed “Glory to our great Stalin! Slava! Ur-r-r-rah!”
Sometimes there would be groups of people in national costumes—colorful, kerchiefed Byelorussians or Ukrainians. They would catch my eye as they went past, close aboard, and I would clap all by myself, to have them bow and laugh and wave acknowledgment and afterwards to go dancing off. [...] And everywhere in the parade were small children, carried on the shoulders of their sweating fathers, standing high above the colorful, streaming crowd, often with little skirts spread out over father’s bald head to protect him from the May sun.
They were all so thrilled and delighted to have seen Stalin, to have had him wave at them personally, that they fairly beamed as they passed us, looking curiously at the strange uniforms and the great mass of generals, and shouting ‘Glory to our Red Army!’ – at which the generals would smile dignifiedly, and themselves wave back. And always, high overhead, were small colored balloons, adrift from somewhere in the watching or marching multitude.
Stevens knew that many foreigners would find this display staged and perhaps even forced, and while he admitted it was far from spontaneous, it was convinced that the feelings displayed before him were genuine. He was so close to the marchers that he could have reached out and touched them, and the faces of the men, women, and children marching past left him no doubt that they were in fact enjoying themselves. “They were a part in a great show—actors before Stalin himself.”
Martin witnessed three May Day and two 7 November celebrations. The first four of these in 1952 and 1953 he photographed extensively from the embassy on Mokhovaya. The vast parade of military hardware, soldiers, and officers provided the best opportunity for the embassy staff to form some picture of the Soviet armed forces, and they made certain to record everything that passed by in front of their eyes.
It was exactly this sort of activity that Ambassador Kennan had objected to and felt undermined the status of the U.S. mission, hampered the improvement of relations between the two countries, and even endangered the American personnel. Naval attaché Stevens recalled being up on the embassy roof for May Day 1949 and noticing that the attic windows of the neighboring Moscow University had been boarded up.
While some of the Americans were busy taking pictures of the Soviet air force flyover, they kept hearing a strange whirring sound. They looked around but couldn’t see where it was coming from, until one of them noticed a small chink in the boarded windows of the university attic and spied a movie camera aimed squarely at them.
To Stevens and his colleagues, the situation was hilarious and no cause for any concern. In the end, their view won out and Kennan’s concerns were ignored back at the Pentagon.
Martin and Jan were traveling on leave in western Europe in April 1953 but hurried back to Moscow to watch the May Day parade, for this was to be the last celebration for the Americans on Mokhovaya before moving that month into the new embassy on Tchaikovsky Street. Until then, no American had dared to leave the embassy during the holiday celebrations.
But this year, one of the men, whom Jan dubbed “a brave soul,” decided that since this was to be their last May Day in the old embassy, he wanted to get a picture from the street of the building with its large American flag. Out he went with his camera, and once the other Americans saw him, they followed after with their cameras.
The militiamen and marchers were stunned and could hardly believe their eyes as the smiling Americans, their shutters snapping, crowded the sidewalk. Such a situation was unthinkable while Stalin was still alive.
After that, the parties at the American embassy came to an end. With the move to Tchaikovsky Street, the Americans lost their bird’s-eye view to the Soviet Union’s greatest public celebrations. On the afternoon of 1 May 1954, Martin had to be content with walking the city center, through Pushkin Square, down Gorky Street, and into Red Square, mingling with and photographing the city’s residents out enjoying themselves on their day off.
