We have it way better than our forefathers. We've got cooler weapons, better hygiene, thousands of new drugs and Flamin' Hot Cheetos. And yet, despite our massive technological advantage and larger brains and even bigger Cheetos guts, we're still far behind our ancestors in one important category: the bitchingness of our parties.

7 Victory Day

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Everyone who wasn't a Nazi had reason to celebrate Germany's surrender in the Second World War. In the U.K., tens of thousands of Londoners partied in Piccadilly Circus and Trafalgar Square like it was 1999. In the U.S., half a million people packed into Times Square until Mayor LaGuardia literally told them to go home. In Paris, the French celebrated as if winning the war was their idea all along, and in Rome, the Italians shook hands with one another as if the whole thing was just a big soccer game. Meek and mild Canada surprised everyone by pulling the old "celebrate by rioting and looting liquor stores" standby.



A literal demon lurks behind this placid facade.

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But once news reached Moscow that the Soviets had just won their Lord of the Rings-esque war for survival against the Germans invaders, let's just say that they partied in a way that would have made 1999 order a cup of coffee and think very seriously about giving up the bottle. The party started when the official invitation was delivered at 1:10 a.m. on May 9, 1945, by the chief announcer of Radio Moscow.

Then Shit Got Out of Hand ...

Moscow's celebration of the surrender of Germany just might be the single largest spur-of-the-moment anything in history. Thousands of people immediately took to the streets to transform one of the largest cities on the planet into "a sea of vodka," many of them still in their nightclothes.



It was kind of a big deal.

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Muscovites went on bar-crawls past the embassies of the Allied nations, which sure enough joined in the vodkafest with some of their own alcohol. By the time Joseph Stalin addressed the nation after 22 hours of partying, the entire city's liquor reservoirs were bone dry. As one reporter put it, "I was lucky to buy a liter of vodka at the train station when I arrived, because it was impossible to buy any later ... There was no vodka in Moscow on May 10, we drank it all."