From Speech at Celebration Meeting of the Moscow Soviet

Stalin

Speech at Celebration Meeting of the Moscow Soviet of Working People’s Deputies and Moscow Party and Public Organizations

November 6, 1943

(...)

The Germans counted on retaining a firm hold on the Ukraine in order to avail themselves of Ukrainian agricultural produce for their army and population, and of Donbas coal for the factories and railways serving the German army. But here, too, they miscalculated. As a result of the successful Red Army offensive the Germans lost not only the Donbas coal, but also the richest grain-producing regions of the Ukraine, and there is no reason to suppose that they will not also lose the rest of the Ukraine in the very near future. (Loud applause.) Naturally, all these miscalculations could not but worsen, and in fact did radically worsen, the economic and military-political position of fascist Germany.

Fascist Germany is passing through a profound crisis. She is facing disaster.

(...)

It is well known that as a result of invasion by the fascist hordes, our country was temporarily deprived of the important agricultural districts of the Ukraine, the Don and the Kuban. And yet our collective and State farms supplied the army and the country with food without any serious interruptions. Of course, without the collective farm system, without the self-sacrificing labour of the men and women collective farmers, we, could not have coped with this most difficult task. If in the third year of the war our army is not experiencing a shortage of food, and if the population is supplied with food and industry with raw materials, this is evidence of the strength and vitality of the collective farm system, of the patriotism of the collective farm peasantry.

(...)

The Soviet people and the Red Army clearly see the difficulties of the forthcoming struggle. But to-day it is already clear that the day of our victory is approaching. The war has entered the stage when it is a question of completely expelling the invaders from Soviet soil and liquidating the fascist “New Order in Europe.” The time is not far off when we shall completely expel the enemy from the Ukraine and Byelorussia, from the Leningrad and Kalinin Regions, and liberate from the German invaders the peoples of the Crimea, Lithuania, Latvia, Esthonia, Moldavia and the Karelo-Finnish Republic.