New Soviet Defense Minister Yevgeny Shaposhnikov decreed an end to the Nov. 7 Revolution Day parades, a procession of tanks and rockets in Red Square that has annually marked the Communist coming-to-power since 1917.
"The autumn sleep of Muscovites will not be disturbed this year by drums and roaring military machines: there will be no military parade in Moscow to mark the 74th anniversary . . . " the Komsomolskaya Pravda wrote with saracasm.It said Shaposhnikov, who succeeded accused coup plotter Marshal Dmitry Yazov, banned the parade after consulting with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and Russian President Boris Yeltsin.
"In taking this decision, the USSR Defense Ministry was guided by several reasons: It seems unproper now to celebrate the October coup of 1917, and no country in the world carries out military parades except for Cuba and North Korea," the newpaper said.
"In the present economic situation the country cannot afford of assembling in Moscow that military armada and feeding and training it during two months just to have its one-hour walk over Red Square," the newspaper said.
For Western analysts, the Nov. 7 parade was a rare chance, until the perestroika era, to seek clues to who was in charge of the country by the lineup of Politburo atop the Lenin Mausoleum. Western journalists would peer at the leadership through binoculars.
Now the Politburo as well as the Communist Party has been legally disbanded, and the Supreme Soviet in October is to consider whether to remove Lenin's body from the mausoleum and bury it in Leningrad.
The Nov. 7 parade was held without fail, including the World War II years. In 1941, Soviet soldiers marched through Red Square on Nov. 7 and kept going right to the front for the decisive battle of Moscow in which the Red Army stopped a Nazi advance on the Soviet capital.
Although the Communists took power Oct. 25, 1917, the holiday was always celebrated on Nov. 7 because of a change in the calendar used after the revolution. It was called "the great October," mostly with open snickering in the perestroika years and in private before then.