The rain poured down on Marshal Joseph Stalin and his commissars as they stood atop Lenin's red granite mausoleum. It poured down on 200 unblinking Red Army soldiers as they marched stiff-legged across Moscow's Red Square. It drenched the 1,400-piece military band and the cheering crowds who had braved the weather to see Marshal Konstantin K. Rokossovsky (on a black horse) and Marshal Georgi Zhukov (on a white horse) lead rumbling masses of tanks and motorized artillery in Russia's biggest victory celebration.
But most eyes were on the 200 soldiers. Each of them carried a captured German flag bedecked with...
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