Victory Day 2025: 80 Years Since the Soviet Triumph Over Fascism
The Victory
Today, May 9, 2025, marks 80 years since the Soviet Union's historic victory over Nazi Germany. The day is far more than a military anniversary to be marked with parades and commemorations, it is a day that must remind the working class the world over of its revolutionary mission. For it was not liberalism, not pacifism, not the capitalist powers of the USA and UK, but socialist power—spearheaded by the Soviet people and the partisans of Europe under the bright red flag of Communism—that dealt the fatal blow to fascism in Europe. The Red Army, born from intense class struggle both nationally and internationally, broke the back of the Wehrmacht and raised the red flag over Berlin.
For decades, bourgeois historians have distorted this victory, especially in the education system of the USA. The D-Day landings at Normandy are presented as the turning point where the USA came to the rescue of Europe. This has the double-effect of concealing the titanic battles of the Eastern Front and obscuring the broader strategic objectives of D-Day: halting the advance of the Red Army which by June 1944 was launching Operation Bagration. But for us the truth remains unshakeable: 80% of German military casualties occurred fighting the Red Army. Operation Bagration alone eviscerated Army Group Centre, turning the tide irreversibly. The liberation of Europe was not a gift from capital, not another triumph of the ever-glorious American eagle, but the result of proletarian heroism and sacrifice on a scale never before seen in history.
Victory Day must not be sanitized into nationalist nostalgia. It is a reminder that the organized, conscious working class can smash the most monstrous forms of capitalist reaction. The hammer and sickle, our immortal symbols, not only defeated fascism but gave humanity a glimpse of our collective potential.
The Scale of Destruction
The cost of that victory, however, is almost beyond comprehension. Over 27 million Soviet citizens perished—workers, peasants, women, children, soldiers. Thousands of cities and towns were reduced to ashes. Villages were burned, factories destroyed, entire nationalities designated for annihilation by the Nazi regime. This was not a war of "misunderstanding" or "extremism on both sides," as bourgeois apologists frame it. This was a war of extermination, a war to the death, launched by capitalism against a workers’ state with the explicit goal of destroying socialist power.
Operation Barbarossa was much more than the largest invasion in history. It was a plan to annihilate the Soviet Union and open its lands to German capital, guided by the concept of Lebensraum (explicitly influenced by the American concept of Manifest Destiny). The Nazis envisioned the depopulation of European Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. Soviet POWs were starved by the millions. Civilians were liquidated en masse. The Siege of Leningrad alone killed over a million. Yet in the face of this horror, the Soviet people did not buckle—they resisted.
Source: RIA Novosti archive
What capitalist nation would endure such devastation and still fight with unity and purpose? It was only under socialism that the people could mobilize an entire society—which only twenty years prior had been largely agricultural—and reach victory. The centralized planning of the Soviet economy was directed towards war production at a staggering speed and scale. Entire factories were moved east of the Urals, rebuilt, and resumed production within months. This capacity did not arise by magic. It was the fruit of socialist construction.
This is the scale of what it took to defeat fascism. We do no justice to history, to the tens of millions of workers who’s fight we continue, by downplaying it. Victory Day must remind us of the cruelty of capitalism-imperialism and the indomitable spirit of socialism, of the working class.
The Communists Ended the Holocaust & Liberated Europe
Contrary to US historical revisionism, it was not the Western Allies who ended the Holocaust. It was not the imperialist powers who liberated the camps—it was the Red Army. Soviet soldiers marched into Majdanek, Sobibor, Auschwitz. The soldiers of the socialist world bore witness to the logical end of capitalism’s barbaric imperialist decay.
Let us be clear: the Holocaust was much more than the irrational product of "evil men." It was the culmination of a system that had long viewed colonial conquest, genocide, and mass murder as necessary, profitable methods of rule. From the Belgian Congo to the American South, to the mass famines engineered by British colonialism in India—capitalism had been rehearsing Auschwitz for centuries. Nazi Germany industrialized the human destruction inherent to capitalism.
The Red Army, driven not by profit or plunder but by duty to humanity, brought this to an end. And yet, today's liberal apologists reduce the Soviet soldiers to a footnote or slander them outright. They erase the role of communists in the Resistance—in Yugoslavia and France, in Greece and Italy—who fought with rifles and bombs while the capitalist class collaborated, delayed, and even funded Nazi domination.
Source: commons.wikimedia.org
Fascism was not defeated by petitions or a moralistic crusade by the “free” countries of the US and UK. It was defeated by revolutionary sacrifice, by proletarian blood. And it was communists, working men and women steeled in Marxist-Leninist ideological conviction who liberated millions from the Axis yoke and ended the most horrific mass killing history has known.
The Memory of Soviet Victory and Our Struggle Today
In 2025, history is itself a terrain of the class struggle. The imperialists and their mouthpieces seek to rewrite history, to present themselves as the sole saviors of WWII, to erase the centrality of socialism from fascism’s defeat. They do so not out of ignorance, but to disarm the working class. For if it is remembered that socialism defeated fascism, then the workers would have one more weapon in our arsenal.
This is why our schools virtually erase the Soviet role. This is why the media equates communism with fascism. This is why Ukrainian fascists are armed and glorified while Soviet monuments are torn down. To remember the truth is to acknowledge the immeasurable power of the working class armed with revolutionary theory and state power.
Victory Day must be an occasion for recommitment. As reaction once again stalks the world, conjured up by the rising tensions in the imperialist world system—from the Zionist genocide in Gaza to the boots of ICE in the USA—we must remember that the red flag that was raised over Berlin is ours. We must fight to raise it triumphantly once again.
We honor the memory of the millions of workers who with their own blood resisted a war of annihilation, defended socialist power, ended a genocide, and victoriously smashed the most barbaric form of capitalism-imperialism, fascism.
As the imperialists prepare for new wars, let the spectre of communism once again haunt them! Let Victory Day serve as a reminder of workers’ power! Let us be invigorated to organize the revolutionary forces, to fight for the new world.
The working class has won before—and it will win again! This is the meaning of Victory Day.
