"This is our holiday," said Larisa Golubeva, a businesswoman in her 50s carrying a portrait of Stalin as she marched down Tverskaya street in central Moscow along with more than 10,000 other pro-communist demonstrators.
"I didn't go to demonstrations before but I've come now because this is my protest. There will be another revolution," Golubeva said.
Demonstrators in both Moscow and Saint Petersburg voiced anger at the abolition of the traditional November 7 holiday by the Russian parliament in favour of a November 4 "Popular Unity Day" - a move the Communist Party has branded "a crime against history".
"Shame On Putin's Regime For Stealing the History and Memory of the People!," read one of the banners at the Moscow march as communists, leftist nationalists, radical youth groups and others chanted "Lenin Revolution! Stalin Victory!"
"Young people don't have a future under the current regime. We want to change the regime," said student Ilya Shcherbakov, 19, an activist with the radical National Bolsheviks.
The march in Moscow ended with a demonstration next to the Karl Marx monument near Red Square that was addressed by veteran Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov.
Zyuganov reiterated his opposition to growing calls from top officials to bury the embalmed corpse of the Soviet Union's founder Lenin, currently housed in a mausoleum on Red Square.Also on Monday, around 1,500 demonstrators gathered in the centre of Saint Petersburg, the revolution's birthplace.