MOSCOW, May 6. We continue a series of materials about a unique collection of digitized attributed photographs from the repository, which contains more than three million frames. The earliest date back to the middle of the 19th century. Employees of the Visual Projects Service conduct scientific work to find reliable information about historical photographs of different years.
“” has about eight thousand negatives made by Soviet photographers during the Second World War. Correspondents from the first days of the war “with a Leica and a notebook” got in line and left us unique evidence of the time — about a million shots were taken in four years. Not all were immediately made public, some saw the light only in the post-war years.
About 200 photojournalists worked at the fronts. Many went through the whole war and reached Berlin. Among them are Yevgeny Khaldei, Viktor Temin, Yakov Ryumkin, Boris Yaroslavtsev, Vladimir Grebnev.
Yevgeny Khaldei's shot of the hoisting of the Victory Banner over the Reichstag building was widely known. But not everyone knows that he was not the only photojournalist who stood on the roof of the Reichstag on May 2, 1945 with a camera. Krasnaya Zvezda correspondent Vladimir Grebnev also worked there. Both of these photographs have become relics that are carefully kept by the editors of the publications where the masters worked.
Since July 1942, photographer Vladimir Grebnev was seconded to the editorial office of the army newspaper «Front-line Soldier» — the official printed edition of the 3rd shock army, with which he went through the battle path from Moscow to Berlin, was awarded the Order of the Red Star.
The negative of the most valuable historical photographic document, which depicted the installation of the banner of Victory, Grebnev later handed over to the Soviet Information Bureau, which later became the Novosti Press Agency. A certificate from the registration book of photographic materials has been preserved, confirming that a series of 21 original negatives (narrow film 35mm) called “Berlin 1945” was submitted.
Great Patriotic War 1941-1945 Berlin strategic offensive operation (from April 16 to May 8, 1945). A Soviet soldier distributes bread to the women of liberated Berlin. Germany, Berlin, 1945.
Photojournalist Oleg Knorring collaborated with the Krasnaya Zvezda newspaper, went to Berlin and took dozens of shots that went down in history: moments of battles, prisoner of war camps, burned Russian villages and destroyed cities. But the shot he took on the streets of liberated Berlin in the spring of 1945 stands apart. The photo from the archive shows a manifestation of the mercy and humanism of a Soviet soldier who shares bread with the inhabitants of the German capital. » data-crop-ratio=»1.511480214948705″ data-crop-width=»600″ data-crop-height=»907″ data-source-sid=»rian_photo» class=»m-vertical lazyload» width=»1920″ height=»2902″ decoding=»async» />
Beginning of the Great Patriotic War. June 24, 1941 in Kyiv. Ukrainian SSR.
The unique discovery was made by the staff of the Visual Projects Service of the news agency in 2019. In one of the safes, photographic films were found, which were previously considered lost. Among these materials was the negative of Kazimir Liszko's frame, made by him at the very beginning of the Great Patriotic War. The photograph depicting the first Nazi air raids on Kyiv was taken on June 24, 1941. The second discovery associated with this picture was the realization that the original negative was cropped by the author. The German planes in the upper part of the frame were shaded by the photographer, but our specialists managed to recreate the original image, which is now available in the Agency's media bank. This find is especially valuable, because not many shots have survived that documented the military operations of the first days of the Second World War.