«Улыбаясь и плача, обнимаются и целуются все подряд» Великая Победа в воспоминаниях очевидцев. Как мир встретил 9 мая 1945 года?

Smiling and Crying, Everyone Hugs and Kisses Everyone Else

The Great Victory in Eyewitness Memories. How Did the World Meet 9 May 1945?

9 May 2025 marks the 80th anniversary of Victory in the Great Patriotic War. Many people regard this day as Russia’s principal national holiday and, at the same time, its most important state holiday. The memory of the difficult war against Nazi Germany, which demanded enormous sacrifices and efforts, became a shared value for people of different nationalities and religious and political convictions. Lenta.ru assembled dozens of recollections by direct eyewitnesses in order to recreate the atmosphere of the very first Victory Day, celebrated on 9 May 1945, in cities and villages from Germany to Kazakhstan.

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“They have just said that the war is over. 9 May, 5:30 a.m.,” seventeen-year-old Tanya Vassoevich wrote in red pencil at the top of a new page in her diary.

Earlier, Tanya had made a hiding place in the diary: a sealed double-page spread whose contents no one was to see, even if the diary fell into someone else’s hands by accident or malice. On that spread was a plan she had drawn of the Lutheran Cemetery in Leningrad, showing the section where her mother, Ksenia Platonovna, and her elder brother Vladimir, who died of starvation in the besieged city, were buried. The girl carefully marked their graves in green.

Vova and Tanya had been very close. Her brother died in December 1941. His sister, then thirteen, had to arrange the death certificate herself, at the very moment another artillery bombardment began.

Tatyana herself organized Vova’s funeral and later her mother’s, whose body lay at home for nine days while the daughter tried to decide what to do next. She approached the task with maximum composure, attention and care, which is why she decided to draw the plan.

In May 1945 she was living and studying in Alma-Ata, where early morning had already arrived when Victory was announced. In Moscow it was still deep night.

“At 2:10 in the morning they began broadcasting the act of surrender. Once, when people were asked when the war would end, the answer was: Levitan will tell us. And that is how it happened — Levitan read it,” war correspondent Lazar Brontman, who was on duty that night in the editorial office of Pravda, wrote in his diary. Since 1942 Brontman had worked almost continuously at the front, but he met Victory Day in Moscow.

Electron Priklonsky, a technician-lieutenant and driver of an ISU-152 heavy self-propelled gun, also kept a wartime diary. Several times it burned up with his combat vehicle while its author miraculously remained alive. He lost friends, changed crews, regiments and fronts, but went back into battle and started another diary.

On the night of 9 May Priklonsky was going to the front for the fifth time after his corps had been reorganized following heavy losses during the offensive in Poland. Electron had settled in inside his combat vehicle, which was moving west in a military train through Moscow.

“The familiar harsh ‘comfort’ and the smells of diesel fuel and oil that have become almost like home put me in a businesslike frame of mind, and for now I can make my notes without any interference and even struggle with rhymes all night long: the lamp gives enough light,” he recalled.

At night, at a siding before Cherusti railway station in the Shatura area outside Moscow, the self-propelled-gun crewman heard frequent, disorderly shooting.

“Maybe, one of the boys suggested, some unit is practicing a night battle? But we did not rack our brains for long: it was time to sleep, and the shooting soon died away.”

In Europe, where the well-tuned Soviet military machine had driven hundreds of trains and from where news of the surrender now came, fighting had not yet ceased. In southern Germany near the Czechoslovak border, which was still waiting to be liberated from German units that refused to surrender, the highways were crowded with advancing Soviet troops, captured Nazis, civilian refugees and Red Army men who had escaped German captivity.

Yuri Vladimirov, later a candidate of technical sciences and specialist in metalworking, had been a volunteer private during the Great Patriotic War. In May 1942 he served as a gun layer in an anti-aircraft battery and became one of 240,000 soldiers trapped in the encirclement during the unsuccessful attempt to liberate Kharkov. After several attempts to break out, the surviving troops surrendered.

Vladimirov spent three years in German captivity but finally managed to escape on the eve of victory. On the night of 9 May, while Marshal of Victory Georgy Zhukov was accepting the surrender of the German command near Berlin, Vladimirov and several fellow former prisoners stopped for the night near Königstein. Soviet troops were in neighboring houses and on the street. They were hurrying toward Prague and had no time to deal with the fate of former prisoners. Political officers had taught soldiers to despise those who surrendered, but what would happen now that the enemy had been defeated? How would they all continue to live in one country? These questions were discussed in brief but emotional conversations.

“At last we ate some potatoes, and the owner wished us good night and left. Suddenly the kitchen door opened and a drunken infantry sergeant major armed with a pistol stumbled in. Without any greeting the uninvited guest sat down on a chair and shouted at us: ‘Who are you? What are you doing here?’ Andrei answered: ‘We are former prisoners; we stopped here for the night.’ The sergeant major immediately pulled his pistol from its holster and ‘clarified’ who we were: ‘You are traitors to the Motherland, turncoats! We shed blood at the front while you sat it out with the Germans and fattened your faces! When you return to the Motherland they will tie a Stolypin necktie around your neck,’ meaning they would hang us, send us to rot in Siberia, or even farther away, to Magadan.”

The encounter with this “liberating soldier” terrified Yuri and his companions. Vladimirov told himself: “So be it. We must return to the Motherland anyway. Better to die in the Motherland than waste away in a foreign land!” Yet the night visitor who had delivered the angry tirade suddenly softened and treated the former prisoners to cigarettes — after all, it was Victory.

“Better to die than disgracefully surrender to the Judeo-Bolsheviks”

At 3:30 p.m. on 30 April 1945 Adolf Hitler committed suicide. He was in his Führerbunker in Berlin, only 500 meters from Soviet troops. The Führer’s death did not immediately stop the fighting.

“The Germans refused to capitulate. At 21:15 the artillery preparation will begin. We shall speak in the language of weapons,” Lieutenant Vladimir Gelfand wrote on the evening of 30 April. He was keeping the combat log at the headquarters of one of the divisions storming the German capital.

Immediately afterward he wrote in his diary that several emissaries carrying a white flag came out to meet the Soviet assault troops. Under the agreement reached with them, the Berlin garrison under Helmuth Weidling surrendered to the Red Army on 2 May. That same day in Flensburg in northern Germany — the new capital of the dying Third Reich — Hitler’s successor, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, chaired a meeting of the reassembled government. The German command’s main goal was now to escape the advancing Soviet troops and surrender to the Western Allies.

The Germans relied on partial surrenders concluded at army-group level and below. In Italy and western Austria, Army Group C under Colonel General von Vietinghoff-Scheel surrendered on 2 May. On 4 May the new commander-in-chief of the German navy, Fleet Admiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg, signed the surrender of all German armed forces in the Netherlands, Denmark, Schleswig-Holstein and northwestern Germany.

Dönitz then sent Friedeburg to Reims, where Eisenhower’s headquarters and the Supreme Allied Command were located, to sign the surrender of all German forces fighting on the Western Front. The Americans covered the walls of the negotiation room with maps showing the situation on the fronts and planned attacks — genuine ones, perhaps. Friedeburg was deeply impressed by the display. His proposal for surrender only in the West was rejected. The Americans stated that only a general surrender was possible and that troops must remain where they were rather than surrendering to whichever side they preferred.

The persistent unwillingness to surrender to the Bolsheviks was found mainly among the command and committed Nazis, rather than among ordinary people. In April 1945 Soviet soldier Yuri Vladimirov escaped captivity while in Kamenz and hid with a German family who understood that the war was ending.

“They gave me breakfast and a little bread and ham for the road,” Vladimirov recalled. “I was about to leave when I suddenly thought that our troops would soon enter the village and someone might harm the owners. So I decided to leave them a written certificate saying that they had treated me, a Soviet prisoner of war hiding in their home, well.”

The formal Germans were delighted to receive such a certificate from a Soviet prisoner. But on the highway Vladimirov met two Germans instead of Red Army soldiers and was captured again. Until 3 May he sat in a prison cell with several other escapees. A doctor now regularly visited one of them, who had been wounded during his escape attempt. Ordinary townspeople brought the others hot soup and bread with potatoes, something unimaginable earlier. Naturally, they hoped this would count in their favor later. Vladimirov continued issuing his certificates. Besides the prisoners of war, the prison also held Germans who had hurried to raise a white flag over the town hall.

On 2 May, while working in the kitchen, Yuri overheard a conversation among several respectable Germans. They were discussing whether to defend Kamenz against the Bolsheviks or surrender it without a fight. One especially zealous Nazi, whose round Party badge shone brightly on his lapel, demanded that they “under no circumstances surrender the city to the Russians, but turn it into a fortress and defend it to the last drop of blood, mobilizing the entire population capable of bearing arms.”

“Better to die than disgracefully surrender to the Judeo-Bolsheviks,” the man declared. It later turned out that he was the local Nazi Party leader, a man named Zietzmann. Naturally, he could hardly expect leniency.

Kamenz never became a fortress. On 7 May it surrendered to the Soviets without a fight after a delegation led by Communist worker Stefan Wiecha negotiated the handover.

Jodl in Reims likewise failed to persuade the Americans to unite against the “Judeo-Bolsheviks.” The meeting took place on the evening of 6 May and lasted about an hour. The German achieved only one thing: he infuriated Eisenhower.

“If they do not stop looking for excuses and wasting time, I will immediately close the entire Allied front and forcibly stop the stream of refugees through our lines. I will tolerate no further delay,” Eisenhower stated sharply.

At 00:40 on 7 May Dönitz radioed Friedeburg permission to sign a general surrender. It turned out that the head of the Nazi navy already had appropriate authorization in reserve for this purpose. They decided not to wait until morning for the signing ceremony but to hold it at 02:30 Central European Time. The Nazis nevertheless obtained a short delay, because military operations were not required to stop until almost two days later, at 23:01 Central European Time on 8 May.

Dönitz intended to use that time for a mass flight westward away from the Soviets. The corresponding order was issued an hour before the surrender was signed.

During the day on 7 May German radio told the population that the war was over. Foreign Minister Count Schwerin von Krosigk delivered a speech in which he said that Germans now had three guiding stars for building a new future: unity, law and freedom.

The USSR’s representative signing the surrender act at Reims was Major General of Artillery Ivan Susloparov, head of the Soviet military mission in France attached to Allied headquarters. He requested permission from his command but received no reply and acted on his own initiative. Only after the signing did Susloparov receive a telegram categorically forbidding him to sign the surrender. Stalin was displeased.

“The agreement signed at Reims cannot be revoked, but neither can it be recognized. The surrender must be carried out as the most important historical act and accepted not on the territory of the victors but where fascist aggression came from — in Berlin — and not unilaterally, but necessarily by the supreme commands of all the countries of the anti-Hitler coalition.”

The Allies accommodated the Soviet leader. The surrender was signed again on the night of 8–9 May in the Berlin suburb of Karlshorst. Journalists who had attended the ceremony in Reims agreed to postpone publication of what they had witnessed. Only Associated Press reporter Edward Kennedy disobeyed, for which he was dismissed by the agency. The surrender was officially announced in the West only during the day on 8 May.

“Bah! And the French are here!”

By agreement among the governments of the USSR, the United States and Great Britain, the Reims procedure came to be described as preliminary. The final act in Berlin was signed by Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, chief of the Wehrmacht High Command staff; Luftwaffe representative Colonel General Stumpff; and Kriegsmarine Admiral von Friedeburg.

In Karlshorst they were met by Marshal Georgy Zhukov and Britain’s Marshal Arthur Tedder, deputy supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force. Witness signatures were added by General Spaatz of the United States and General de Lattre de Tassigny of France.

The text of the second act repeated the first, signed at Reims, almost word for word and confirmed the cease-fire time: 23:01 Central European Time on 8 May.

“After signing the act, Keitel rose from the table, put on his right glove and once again tried to display military bearing, but he did not succeed and quietly returned to his table. At 0:43 on 9 May the signing of the act of unconditional surrender was completed. I invited the German delegation to leave the hall.”

Keitel, Friedeburg and Stumpff left with heads bowed. Then an unimaginable noise rose in the hall. “Everyone congratulated one another and shook hands. Many had tears of joy in their eyes,” Zhukov wrote.

Soviet citizens learned of the signing in Karlshorst from a Sovinformburo announcement at 2:10 a.m. Moscow time on 9 May 1945. Announcer Yuri Levitan read the Act of Military Surrender of Nazi Germany and the decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet declaring 9 May the Victory Holiday. Under precisely that name Victory Day later appeared in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia.

Although the meeting in Karlshorst can in some respects be called secondary, it entered history partly because of a vivid remark attributed to Keitel about the French.

“In the final act of surrender, the representative of France placed his signature alongside those of Russia, the United States and Great Britain. Field Marshal Keitel even exclaimed: ‘Bah! And the French are here!’ thereby proving that France and its army had not spent so much effort and made so many sacrifices in vain.”

The phrase gave rise to a popular joke that the French had not defeated the Germans at all, but was it actually spoken? It does not appear in Zhukov’s memoirs. De Gaulle was not at the ceremony. As it turned out, the original source — or rather, the actual witness — was René Bondoux, who accompanied Marshal de Lattre de Tassigny to the surrender ceremony in Berlin on 8 May.

“Then Keitel gets up, takes his cap, gloves and marshal’s baton and heads for the table presided over by Zhukov, to take the vacant place next to de Lattre,” Bondoux recalled. “Passing von Friedeburg, he muttered under his breath: ‘Next to a Frenchman — inconceivable.’”

News of Victory

Fighting and skirmishes continued in some parts of Europe even after 9 May, while the war with Japan was still in full swing. The best-prepared Soviet units would soon be sent there, to the Far Eastern Front. Ordinary Soviet people waited for news from fathers, sons, mothers and sisters who were still fighting. Under such conditions, was the officially recognized Victory Holiday on 9 May 1945 truly a popular holiday? The answer found in unique memories of ordinary people — collected in villages and rural settlements by two hundred students of Kostroma State Technical University for the book The Last Witnesses of the Great Patriotic War... — is an unequivocal yes.

“Every day the postman came and said the war would end soon. Every day,” recalled Nina Smirnova from the village of Grigorkovo in the Krasnoselsky district of Kostroma Region, who was nineteen in May 1945. “And before Victory Day I had a dream. I am praying in church, and a parrot is sitting on the gate repeating: ‘Soon, soon, soon the war will end.’ In the morning I told my mother. And indeed, less than a week later a messenger on horseback came to our village. He rode through the village shouting: ‘The war is over, it is over!’”

Nine-year-old Ksenia Malysheva met 9 May in Irkutsk Region. The day there was bright and sunny. She remembered open windows and crowds filling the streets. “People cried, hugged, danced to the accordion and sang songs. That joyful commotion went on for about two days,” Malysheva recalled.

The children were especially delighted by news that the ration — the bread allowance — would be abolished in the shop, which meant it would be possible to buy as many as ten loaves of bread.

Six-year-old Svetlana Baranova remembered everyone hugging and kissing in Kostroma: “The streets were full of people dressed up for the occasion. But I remember how, amid the general celebration, a neighbor was crying. Her two sons and her husband had been killed. She was left completely alone.”

In villages of Kostroma Region, according to old resident Boris Gusev, people stayed by the radio waiting for news from Berlin, yet still fell asleep. At two in the morning on 9 May everyone was awakened by the collective-farm chairwoman, Gusev’s neighbor Paraskeva Pokholkova. “She ran through the village banging a rake on windows and walls: ‘Get up! Victory!’” he recalled.

In the morning there was a rally in the district center of Sudai, where district Party secretary Timofei Gusev delivered an eloquent speech. Boris remembered his words for the rest of his life: “The Germans wanted pies and sweet rolls, but they got cuffs and bumps instead!”

Nadezhda Shubrova from Khabarovsk was eleven. She remembered an unusual fireworks display that people arranged themselves with flare pistols acquired from somewhere. “Everyone shouted, clapped, rejoiced, congratulated one another and cried from happiness,” she said.

Sixteen-year-old Viktor Pinchuk from the Kuban stanitsa of Novoleushkovskaya played with an orchestra on the roof of the House of Culture that day — all day long.

“Early in the morning on 9 May 1945, at about four, a neighborhood boy woke me and said the musicians were urgently being gathered at the school. When we ran there, we learned about Victory. The entire orchestra climbed onto the school roof — it was the tallest building in the stanitsa — and began playing Chernetsky’s march. Alarmed and excited by the music, the villagers ran to the school. Party and government officials announced the joyful news from the balcony. In the end we played on the roof almost the entire day, while the people celebrated and congratulated one another on victory.”

Some settlements and villages had neither radio nor telephone. There the news was passed from person to person. Yet even in Moscow there were people who learned of Victory not from the radio. Among them were tank crewman Priklonsky and everyone traveling with him in the military train that crossed the capital on 9 May.

Electron Priklonsky: “Unconditionally?! How else could it be!”

“With a trembling hand I lock the hatch and begin making my way from platform to platform toward our heated freight car, hoping to find confirmation of my guess there. My heart contracts, then begins pounding with some joyful premonition. I have not quite managed to hop my way back to our men — fortunately I am jumping in the direction the train is moving — when our train begins to slow and soon stops completely.

“All the officers pour like peas from the wide-open door of the freight car onto the platform and surround a bewilderedly smiling railway woman in a red cap. Slowly she moves the warm gaze of her moist eyes from one face to another, all of them bearing the same silent expectation, and her lips begin to tremble. Then she pulls herself together, straightens a strand of dark hair at her right temple, and in a deep voice broken with emotion says, almost exhales:

“‘So you still don’t know… Tonight, at two-oh-one… Germany surrendered… unconditionally.’

“Unconditionally?! How else could it be! We rushed to embrace the stationmaster one after another. I could barely make out the expressions on my comrades’ faces… Then our locomotive gave a long whistle, and reluctantly we climbed back into the carriage.”

Joy and Tears

Tanya Vassoevich, who had written the victory announcement in red pencil in her wartime diary, went to her school in Alma-Ata that day and began making a poster reading “Glory to the Heroes of Victory,” although she had never made posters before.

“But the main thing is desire, and I had a very strong desire. So, taking a red cloth and arming myself with chalk, I began to write. The poster lay on the school grounds,” she recalled. “Girls stood all around and sang. Whenever anyone approached, everyone shouted ‘Hurrah, hurrah, hurrah!’ I wrote, sang and shouted ‘Hurrah!’ — all at once. It was so good! I really feel that this is victory; I am happy about it, I want to make a beautiful poster…”

War correspondent Lazar Brontman went into the center of Moscow with friends during the day on 9 May. Everyone was discussing when Stalin would speak. They took the metro from Belorusskaya to Teatralnaya. There was a crowd and even a crush, especially at the exit, and the metro station was soon closed. Outside there was also a crowd. According to him, many people, especially women, had managed to put on festive clothes.

“All of Manezhnaya and all of Red Square are packed. Some are singing songs, some are walking with a red flag pulled out of a house, there are many children walking hand in hand so they do not lose one another.”

Veteran front-line soldiers who happened to be in Moscow on 9 May felt awkward. Electron Priklonsky and his comrades left their train for food while it stood on the ring railway, where the Moscow Central Circle now runs. When they returned, they discovered the train had already departed. They had to catch up with it at Krasnaya Presnya. The officers ran across the city.

“We hurry along, embarrassed by our appearance and shielding one another. The streets and squares are filled with unprecedented animation,” Priklonsky described the unusual forced march. “People who know one another and complete strangers congratulate each other, smiling and crying; everyone hugs and kisses everyone else, and everywhere there is the same refrain: the war is over!”

In some places the self-propelled-gun crews had to form a wedge to squeeze more easily through the festive crowd. Battalion commander Sergei Fedotov went at the point, with the Orders of Alexander Nevsky, the Patriotic War and the Red Star on his chest. He was the only one whose uniform was clean and neat. The others were dressed in whatever they had. Priklonsky himself wore a greasy tank helmet and a captured rabbit-fur vest — hardly parade attire.

At Belorussky railway station they “fell into an encirclement” and were “forced” to dance with the celebrating public. Overall, however, the forced march through the capital, boiling like a swarming beehive, ended successfully; they even had to wait another two hours before the train departed.

“Joyful smiles and tears in people’s eyes. How much happiness there is on their faces! How wonderful! Right on the pavement, in front of the entrance to the metro station, dressed-up girls broke into a dance [...] After dancing briefly and kissing the girls, we hurry on. Above Moscow — it seems to me above the entire earth — the sun shines brightly and cheerfully.”

Yet the times were difficult. Many people in the rear were literally starving and remembered 9 May in their own way. Tamara Andreeva from the village of Neverovo in the Nerekhta district was fourteen. On Victory Day her father brought home a sack of rusks and sugar. By then the family had eaten nothing for four days. “Silently and greedily we dipped the rusks into water without sugar and could not get enough; it was as though everything fell into an abyss and flew past the stomach,” Andreeva recalled.

In the village of Ishutino in the Vacha district of Gorky Region, news that the war was over was brought by a special mounted messenger because there was no other means of communication. According to local resident Alexander Davydov, who was ten at the time, that day contained everything in abundance: joy, jubilation and tears.

That same day a young mare was born in the village stable. She was named Pobeda — Victory — and the villagers decided she would be exempted for life from plowing and other heavy work.

For many people it was difficult to smile even through tears. Seventeen-year-old Elena Semennikova was one of them. Her father had been killed at the front, her brother was missing, and her mother had died during the Siege of Leningrad. The girl moved in with her grandmother in Sudislavl district and studied at a technical school in Galich. Every week she walked forty kilometers from Galich to her grandmother’s village to get milk and baked potatoes, then forty kilometers back. Victory Day happened to fall on one of these difficult eighty-kilometer journeys.

“I am approaching the village of Pronino. An old man comes toward me and says: ‘Girl, do you know the news? The war is over,’” she recalled. “And all the way to Galich — there were another twenty-five kilometers left — I sobbed and remembered. I walked staring down at the stones under my feet. It was so bitter: ‘Imagine, the war is over. What joy — but what joy is there? What do I have to wait for? There is no one left.’”

Semennikova did not yet know that her brother was alive. He had been encircled and then captured, managed to escape, and finished the war in Berlin. Former prisoner of war Yuri Vladimirov and his companions, like Semennikova, also spent all of 9 May walking — toward Dresden, not knowing what fate awaited them.

“A mass of people was moving along, mostly prisoners of war, but also civilians who had been deported from the USSR and Poland during the war, and German families,” Vladimirov recalled. “Our soldiers stood along the roadside, staring intently into the faces of former prisoners in the hope of seeing relatives, loved ones or comrades missing in the war. They did not merely look closely; they loudly called out their names and the names of their home towns. But most often they heard the answer: ‘No. No, we haven’t met them.’”

In Czechoslovakia Soviet soldiers likewise had no time to celebrate on 9 May. During the war Ivan Novokhatsky commanded a communications platoon, a reconnaissance platoon and a battery of 76-mm ZIS-3 regimental guns. He fought from Demyansk to Prague and later took part in the famous march across the Mongolian desert during the Soviet-Japanese War.

On Victory Day he went with one battalion toward almost certain death despite knowing that the surrender had already been signed. Their task was to draw the fire of every type of enemy weapon so that the remaining units — the division’s main forces — could locate the firing points, suppress them, and only then attack.

Ivan Novokhatsky: “Into the last attack of this war”

“Of course unpleasant feelings crowd everyone’s chest and mind — who wants to die when the war is officially over? It is absurd and bitter. [...] The battalion commander stands up to his full height and says to us: ‘Well, men, let’s go.’ Then he gives the order to the battalion: ‘Slavs, attack — forward!’ The battalion’s soldiers rise together to their full height. The line bristles menacingly with bayonets, the soldiers’ faces stern as they silently advance. The enemy is suspiciously quiet. What does it mean — have they decided to let us come closer and then coolly shoot down the battalion with aimed fire? Or have they not spotted us yet? We go twenty paces… thirty… Soon the morning silence is torn apart by the choking, almost frightened crackle of an enemy machine gun.

“Someone falls, killed or wounded; someone drops flat. Then comes the strained voice of the commander, taken up by company and platoon commanders: ‘Attack! Forward! HURRAH!!!’ The battalion seems to shudder, exhaling a many-voiced ‘HURRAH! HURRA-A-AH!’ The line breaks into a run. Suddenly behind us comes a mighty roar of hundreds of voices: ‘HURRA-A-AH!!!’ The entire division front, as far as we could see it, leaps from the trenches and moves after us. Something unforeseen had happened: soldiers of the other battalions could not stand watching their comrades go into a mortal attack on the enemy, into the last attack of this war.

“There it is — a soldier’s loyalty to front-line brotherhood, without slogans or unnecessary pathos, an impulse of the soldier’s soul coming straight from the heart: comrades are in trouble, the enemy will concentrate all its fire on the thin line of the battalion and hardly anyone will survive, but if the entire front attacks, then perhaps the danger is smaller for everyone. Hardly any of us thought this through at the time. Some unknown force pushed the soldiers out of the trenches without any order.

“The enemy could not withstand the attack. Throwing down their weapons, the Germans jumped from their trenches and ran through the bushes toward their rear, dodging and looking back. Some, hands raised and indescribable fear in their eyes, heads drawn down into their shoulders, waited for their fate.

“How quickly our soldier lets go of anger! The German soldiers had only just been firing, and now they stand with their hands raised, answering every question with the same words: ‘Hitler kaput!’ [...] At once they are treated to makhorka tobacco, then waved toward our rear, to the assembly point,” Ivan Novokhatsky wrote of the episode. “Soldiers catch Germans in the bushes who had been too frightened to surrender immediately and are now confused about where to go — forward or back?”

Fireworks

When darkness fell, the train carrying the self-propelled guns in which Electron Priklonsky was still traveling west — though it was no longer clear why, except that orders were orders — stopped in Mozhaisk. He and his comrades climbed out of their vehicles for some air and to see off that mad, unbelievable day.

“I raise the turret hatch to climb in and sleep, and suddenly the sky in the direction of Moscow lights up broadly and brightly, then again and again. What could it mean? At last it dawns on me: those are fireworks! And they can be seen this far from Moscow! It is more than a hundred kilometers from here… What must be happening right now in the center of our capital?”

In Moscow people gathered in the city center that evening. Both Red Square and Manezhnaya Square were packed. At 21:50 they began announcing Comrade Stalin’s order. The center of the city, Brontman wrote, literally froze into silence. People stopped vehicles moving while the order was being read so that nothing would disturb that silence. Then came Levitan’s words, after the leader’s address: “Thirty salvoes from thousands of guns…” The square gasped, shouted, applauded and laughed. The rest of the words could no longer be heard.

“And then — the fireworks! Hundreds of searchlights met in a blue dome. Barrage balloons rose over Moscow for the last time. Searchlights illuminated an enormous portrait of Stalin raised on a balloon cable and an equally enormous red flag. Rockets, a sea of fire. A magnificent spectacle! But the salvos could be heard only faintly — the guns were positioned on the outskirts. Then Douglas aircraft flew over the Garden Ring and dropped flares.”

Ivan Novokhatsky and his fellow soldiers spent the evening of 9 May on the road toward Prague after breaking through the defenses. The offensive did not stop throughout the night of 10 May.

“The soldiers are exhausted. We manage to rest — or rather sleep for about two hours in turns on the carts. My little horse is tired too,” he wrote. “In the middle of the night I sent a scout to the rear of the battery column with an order for the sergeant major to send a replacement horse.”

The replacement horse turned out to be a donkey, but Novokhatsky discovered this only at dawn, which amused both him and his comrades. During the night the movement along the smooth paved road had a soporific effect. The officer rode at the head of the column, knowing there were no Soviet troops ahead, but periodically fell asleep in the saddle anyway. Novokhatsky also did not know that he would still have to travel to the Far East and fight Japan.

For Yuri Vladimirov, 9 May ended in Pirna, where he and a group of other former prisoners of war stopped for the night on the way to Dresden.

“After drawing water from a well in the yard, my comrades began preparing supper, while I started sewing a new kit bag from canvas...” he recalled. “I also removed almost all the German buttons from my tunic — a German one found on the road — and sewed on my own buttons instead, with the five-pointed star, hammer and sickle.”

That evening Tanya Vassoevich shared with her diary her thoughts about what this holiday with tears in one’s eyes actually meant.

Tatyana Vassoevich: “Mine was a kind of stern joy”

“I want to cry, but now I think one must not cry. What a special day today is! I do not want it to end; I walk home slowly. This is the day millions of people waited for almost four years. Did I wait for it? Yes, I repeated with everyone else: ‘If only the war would end soon!’

“Of course I wanted it to end, but there was something else. Perhaps ‘I was a little afraid of this day’; I thought I had to meet it somehow seriously, that by this time something ought to happen. And when I got dressed in the morning to go to school, I put on my uniform — almost a Pioneer uniform. I wanted to meet the day seriously, so that at that moment I would be doing some real work somewhere.

“I did not have carefree merriment; mine was a kind of stern joy. I danced and sang, but I think I wanted even more to say something to people that would make them immediately courageous, honest, conscientious and hardworking. I wanted them to understand that there is goodness in life when one is truly happy, and one is truly happy only after doing something difficult and noble and then celebrating. Then joy and happiness are genuine.”

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