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The 1945 Victory parade was the first major Soviet event recorded on color film.

The Moscow Victory Parade of 1945 was a victory parade held after the defeat of Nazi Germany in the Great Patriotic War. It took place in the Soviet capital of Moscow, mostly centering around a military parade through Red Square. The parade took place on a rainy June 24, 1945, over a month after May 9th, the day of Germany's surrender to Soviet commanders.

Marshals Georgy Zhukov, who had formally accepted the German surrender to the Soviet Union, and Konstantin Rokossovsky, rode through the parade ground on white and black stallions, respectively.^[1] The fact is commemorated by the equestrian statue of Zhukov in front of the State Historical Museum, on Manege Square. The General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, stood atop of Lenin's Mausoleum and watched the parade. Renowned historian Anthony Beevor states that Stalin actually intended to lead the parade riding Zhukov's white stallion but the horse bolted in the manege because of Stalin's lack of riding skills. Even when the Soviet leader grabbed the mane, he eventually fell to the ground. After that, he just spat and said "Let Zhukov take the parade. He's an old cavalryman." ^[2]

However, this story is disputed by Victor Suvorov. He claims that the story was made up, as a counterargument to his theory^[3] ^[4], since Suvorov uses the fact that Stalin didn't take the Parade to argue that Stalin considered the war's results not worthy of the effort invested^[5]. He claims that the story can be found in no sources older than his book "The last republic", where he refers to that point. Suvorov points out several inconsistencies in the story. For example, the horse on which Zhukov and Stalin rode is called Arabic, while in reality it was a Tersk horse (Which, while having a significant amount of Arabic blood, is not Arabic as such), and there is numerous evidence that Zhukov was intended for his role of taking the parade to begin with^[6].

Displays of the Red Army aircraft and vehicles were some of the focal points of the ceremony. One of the most famous moments at the end of the troops parade took place when various Red Army soldiers carried the banners of Nazi Germany and threw them down next to the Mausoleum.^[7] One of the standards that was tossed down belonged to the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, Hitler's personal bodyguard raised to divisional size.