Assignment 4 - Kyle Hosey

This is my favorite photo to come out of my favorite historical period, World War II. Taken by Yevgeny Khaldei, it depicts a Soviet soldier of the Red Army raising the hammer and sickle above the Reichstag, as the rest of downtown Berlin lies in smoldering ruins in the background. It represented the culmination of Soviet Russia's 3-year long counterattack after finally repulsing the German army groups at Moscow in 1941 and at Stalingrad in 1942. However, the cost of victory was absolutely staggering; as many as 30 million Russians, soldiers and civilians, were killed in the most brutal theater of the war. This photograph shows the final, triumphant result of that horrifying loss of life; the fascisti defeated, the hated enemy capital in ruins, and the Soviet fighting man victorious over the forces of evil. The imagery and symbolism is moving enough for an American, soon to be the sworn enemy of the USSR. Imagine, then,  the emotions provoked in the typical Soviet heart at the concrete evidence that all of their sacrifices, their hardship, an entire generation of young men lost at Kiev, Moscow, Stalingrad, Rzhev and everywhere in between, was not in vain. For me, Khaldei's photograph evokes pride in a country not my own and not even existing in my lifetime. That feeling of pride, mixed with relief and euphoria, must have been felt a thousand times more by each and every Russian for whom the past five years had been nothing but hardship. Here was the final proof; victory where there had only been the gaping jaws of defeat, triumph where there had been nothing but a five-year nightmare of death and destruction.