Victory Day at 81: how the Red Square parade became a recurring stage for Russia's present

On 24 June 1945, the Soviet Union held its first Victory Day parade on Red Square in Moscow — a ceremony delayed by six weeks so that the defeated Wehrmacht could be marched past the very Kremlin walls they had tried to take. Eighty-one years later, on 25 June 2026, the Russian-aligned Telegram channel Two Majors reposted archival footage of that 1945 parade, framing it as the symbolic moment "our people" defeated Nazi Germany. The post is small — a commemorative nod, not a news bulletin — but it sits inside a much larger annual ritual, one that has been quietly repurposed into the staging ground for Russia's present.

The 1945 parade was a logistical and political construction. Joseph Stalin's government moved the original 9 May date to 24 June, after the German Instrument of Surrender on 8 May and the fall of Berlin a week earlier, partly to allow weather and reconstruction to catch up and partly because the regime wanted maximum control over a ceremony that would define the Soviet victory narrative for the next four decades. Roughly 40,000 soldiers and 1,850 pieces of military equipment passed the stands, according to figures widely cited in Russian state media at subsequent anniversaries. The parade's later fixation on 9 May — Victory Day proper — was itself a Soviet-era consolidation: the date was elevated into the country's central secular holiday, the day around which the war's meaning is rehearsed.

A ceremony that does more than commemorate

For most of the post-1945 period, Victory Day in Russia was a relatively quiet civic occasion — wreath-laying, veterans on regional television, anodyne editorials in Pravda. That changed in the late 2000s, when the parade's military hardware and marching formations were restored to Red Square at scale and the rhetoric around the day sharpened. Each spring since, the same choreography — the cannon salute, the inspected troops, the flyover — has been re-run in front of a global television audience, with the editorial weight shifting as Russia's relationship with the West has shifted. The ceremony is no longer retrospective; it is a forward-looking instrument. Speeches at the stands are read for their phrases about NATO, about the post-1945 settlement, about what kind of order Russia intends to defend.

The channel that surfaced this week, Two Majors, sits inside the Russian military-commentator ecosystem: pro-Kremlin in line, openly admiring of the armed forces, hostile to Western narratives. The fact that even a hard-edged current-affairs account reached back eighty-one years to mark the 1945 parade, rather than the 1941 invasion or the 1943 Battle of Kursk, suggests where the editorial emphasis now sits. The 1945 parade is the cleaner story — total victory, broken enemy, a single square filled with Soviet banners — and the one most easily repurposed for present-tense messaging.

The memory has many custodians

There is a counter-narrative that the Russian framing routinely eclipses, and it is worth naming plainly. The Soviet victory was a multinational victory, paid for in Ukrainian, Belarusian, Jewish, Central Asian, and Baltic blood at scales the Russian Federation's commemorative vocabulary rarely registers. Ukraine's contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany — and the human cost on its territory, particularly during the 1941–44 occupation — is one of the foundational stories of modern Ukrainian statehood, and is treated as such in Kyiv's own annual commemorations. Holocaust remembrance has its own institutional architecture across the European continent, and 9 May as Soviet Victory Day has long competed, in places uneasily, with 8 May as the date of European victory and liberation.

A second, sharper counter-line is more recent. Since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, several European governments have publicly debated whether to attend 9 May events at all, and the diplomatic choreography around the date has become a small but visible barometer of relations with Moscow. Within Russia itself, the parade has been described in independent reporting as a venue for the political legitimisation of the war in Ukraine: veterans and serving personnel from that campaign take their place alongside the historical units, and the rhetoric at the podium has framed the present fighting as continuous with 1945. This publication notes that the framing is contested in Ukraine, in the Baltic states, and across much of the EU — but it is also the framing that has held the inside lane in Russian state-adjacent media, including channels such as Two Majors.

What an archive post tells us about the present

The pattern is familiar: an original, datable historical event acquires a secondary life as material for ongoing argument. The 1945 parade is, on its own terms, a record of an army that had marched from Moscow to Berlin and was being marched back, in reverse, past the stand. In 2026, the same footage is doing a different job — anchoring a story about who counts as the legitimate heir to that victory, and by extension who counts as its proper defenders. The Two Majors post did not need to assert that case explicitly; the cumulative weight of eighty-one years of commemorative practice does it for them.

The structural point, stripped of academic scaffolding, is that annual ceremonies of this kind are not just memory work. They are soft-power infrastructure. A square, a date, a flyover, a speech — repeated at sufficient volume for sufficient decades — become the default reference frame for an entire society's reading of a war. Once that frame is set, deviations from it — Ukrainian claims to a parallel heritage, Estonian insistence on Soviet occupation as the central fact of 1944–45, Polish sensitivity to the Red Army's record in 1945 itself — are treated as aberrations to be corrected rather than as alternative histories to be weighed.

Stakes, and what remains genuinely uncertain

What is at stake in the weeks and months ahead is whether the 2026 cycle — which began, for Two Majors and similar outlets, with the 1945 commemoration — can be read as continuity or as escalation. The Kremlin has, in recent years, used the period around 9 May as a window for symbolic gestures to Western governments that have refused to send senior delegations; the absence of a French or German minister from the stands is itself a story. If 2026 follows that pattern, the ceremony will again be both a domestic mobilisation device and an external signal — a thing performed for Russian viewers and a thing performed for everyone else.

What the open sources do not yet establish, and what this publication cannot resolve, is whether the archival emphasis on 1945 in channels like Two Majors signals preparation for any specific anniversary gesture later in the year. The post is commemorative rather than predictive. But the broader pattern of recent years is consistent enough that a careful reader treats the August–May run-up to each Victory Day as a window in which the framing of the war — past and present — is being quietly rehearsed, again, before it is performed at scale.

Desk note: Monexus frames this piece around the 1945 parade as commemorated in Russian military-adjacent media, with explicit acknowledgement of the Ukrainian and broader European counter-readings; the editorial lane treats Russian state-adjacent sources as counter-claim material rather than as primary fact.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://t.me/two_majors
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_Day_(9_May)
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_Victory_Parade_of_1945
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_Day_Parade