To the Revolutionary Military Council of the U.S.S.R. Greetings to the men, commanders and political personnel of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army! Created under the leadership of Lenin, the Red Army covered itself with undying glory in the great battles of the Civil War, in which it drove out the interventionists from the U.S.S.R. and upheld the cause of socialism in our country.

The Red Army is today a bulwark of peace and the peaceful labour of the workers and peasants, the vigilant guardian of the frontiers of the Soviet Union. The workers of our country, who have victoriously completed the five-year plan in four years, are equipping the Red Army with new instruments of defence. Your job, comrades, is to learn to handle those instruments to perfection and to do your duty to your country, should our enemies try to attack it.

Hold high the banner of Lenin, the banner of struggle for communism! Long live the heroic Red Army, its leaders, its Revolutionary Military Council!

J. Stalin

Pravda, No. 53,

February 23, 1933