The decision to hold the first victory parade was made by Stalin on May 24, 1945 after the last group of the Nazi troops had been destroyed. The parade took place on Moscow’s Red Square on June 24, 1945. Two outstanding Marshalls of the Soviet Union, Georgy Zhukov and Konstantin Rokossovsky, were appointed to review the troops.
The 65th Victory Parade, which is going to take place on May 9 2010, will be both an international and all-Russian parade. Parades will take place in dozens of cities of the former USSR, such as Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kiev, Odessa, Kerch, Sevastopol, Murmansk, Volgograd, Tula, Minsk, Brest, Novorossiisk, Smolensk, Astrakhan, Vladivostok, Yekaterinburg, Kaliningrad, Nizhni Novgorod, Novosibirsk, Chita, Khabarovsk and others.
The Moscow parade on May 9 2010 will be the largest and most impressive parade in the history of modern-day Russia.
Legendary T-34 tanks, Katyusha missiles systems and Su-100 self-propelled vehicles will roll on the square after the march of Russian troops. Organizers hoped that it would be possible to see war-time Soviet aircraft in the sky above Moscow, but specialists advised not to take such risks.
Over 110 units of Russia’s state-of-the-art military hardware will be demonstrated during the parade too. Russia’s renowned Topol-M missile complexes will appear without nuclear warheads and will have their imitations instead.
Good old T-90 tanks, Msta-S self-propelled artillery systems, BMP-4, BMD-4 and BTR-90 armored vehicles, Iskander-M tactical systems, S-300 Favorit and S-400 Triumf anti-aircraft complexes will be on display too.
Over 150 modern combat planes and helicopters will fly above Red Square on May 9. Lucky viewers will have a chance to see strategic bombers T-95 and Tu-160, Tu-22M3 supersonic aircraft and Il-78 tanker aircraft, not to mention renowned Russian fighter jets and bombers.
Nearly 1,000 veterans from all republics of the former USSR will arrive in Moscow to view the parade on Red Square. The tribunes for them have already been erected along the Kremlin wall. The leaders of Bulgaria, Vietnam, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, China, Macedonia, Mongolia, Serbia, Slovakia, France, Latvia, Slovenia, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia and many other countries will arrive in Moscow for festive celebrations of the 65th anniversary of the victory.
The leaders of Ukraine, Belarus, the USA and Britain will not be able to come to Russia for personal reasons. The politicians referred to busy schedules.
