1. Yevgeny Khaldei is best known for his World War II photograph of a Soviet soldier raising a flag over the Reichstag in Berlin, the capital of the vanquished Nazi Germany, at the end of the war.
14 Facts About Yevgeny Khaldei
1. 2.
In March 1918, when Yevgeny Khaldei was one year old, his mother was killed during one of the pogroms of the Russian Civil War, by followers of the White movement.
3.
The bullet passed through her body and gravely wounded Yevgeny Khaldei, who survived his injuries.
4.
Yevgeny Khaldei started working with the Soviet press agency TASS since 25 October 1936 as a photographer.
5.
Yevgeny Khaldei witnessed the aftermath of the massacre of 7,000 civilians in Kerch in 1942.
6.
In 1945, Yevgeny Khaldei persuaded his uncle to create a large Soviet flag after seeing Joe Rosenthal's photo of the flag raising at Iwo Jima while the Soviet army closed in on Berlin and took it with him to Berlin for the Reichstag shot.
7.
Yevgeny Khaldei later took photographs of the Nazis at the Nuremberg trials and of the Red Army during its offensive in Japanese Manchuria.
8.
Yevgeny Khaldei's work continues to be distributed through the Sovfoto agency which has operated in the West since 1932.
9.
Yevgeny Khaldei's most renowned photographs were taken when he was a Red Army photographer from 1941 to 1946.
10.
Yevgeny Khaldei's photographs emphasised his feelings for the historic moments and his sense of humour.
11.
Yevgeny Khaldei's work was admired by the elites of the Soviet Union and he is renowned for creating commissioned portraits for State leaders such as Joseph Stalin, Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin.
12.
Yevgeny Khaldei had shot an entire roll of film, 36 images.
13.
When Yevgeny Khaldei arrived at the Reichstag, he simply asked the soldiers who happened to be passing by to help with the staging of the photoshoot; the one who was attaching the flag was 18-year-old Private Aleksei Kovalev from Kiev, the two others were Abdulkhakim Ismailov from Dagestan and Leonid Gorychev from Minsk.
14.
Yevgeny Khaldei was carrying with him a large flag sewn from a red tablecloth by his Jewish friend in Moscow for this very purpose.