The Roads of War

The exhibition “The Roads of War” is a photographic chronicle featuring images taken by military photojournalists along the routes of the Red Army across the USSR and Europe. From the walls of Moscow, the streets and squares of Leningrad, the roads of war lead the viewer, following the heroes of these images, to Bryansk and Pskov, through Belarus, Ukraine, Latvia, Poland, and Germany.

The focus of the exhibition is the everyday reality of wartime life — forced marches and brief rests, river crossings and attacks, the tragedies of partings and the joys of short reunions. The photographs do not present poster-like heroism or the horrors of war, but rather the lived experience of war, seen through the eyes of its anonymous laborers. It is shown as a continuous movement along the path of hardship, a road leading toward victory and toward each person's destiny. The theme of the road is reflected by all war photographers, and each approaches it in their own way.

Moments of meetings and farewells. The photographs capture farewells with children evacuated from Leningrad, with soldiers departing for the front, and moments of reunion with residents of liberated towns and villages, with concentration camp prisoners, with the people of Berlin, and soldiers of the allied armies on the Elbe. Masterpieces of wartime photography — “The Defeat of the Germans Near Moscow,” “In the Liberated Village” by Ivan Shagin, “We Will Stand to the Death!” by Emmanuil Evzerikhin, “A Volley at Enemy Aircraft” by Boris Kudoyarov — are presented alongside lesser-known works. Among them is Y. Pyasetsky’s photograph “The First Airplane Built from the Personal Savings of Collective Farmer F. Golovatyi”, taken in Saratov in 1944. It tells the story of a Yak-1 aircraft purchased in 1942 by the peasant Ferapont Golovatyi at the Saratov aircraft factory for 100,000 rubles, earned from selling two hundredweight of honey. In 1943, the aircraft was donated to Guards Major B. N. Yeryomin. The plane was never shot down, and after its service life ended in 1944, it was returned to Saratov and installed in the town square.

The exhibition includes works by celebrated photographers — Emmanuil Evzerikhin, Boris Kudoyarov, Ivan Shagin, and Sergey Loskutov — as well as photographs by war correspondents whose work is less widely known: Jean Berland, Alexander Ditlov, Boris Pushkin, Semyon Kolonin, Yefim Kopyt, as well as Y. Pyasetsky and Ya. Tabarovsky, whose names deserve a rightful place in the history of Russian photography.

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 The Face of the Siege

This exhibition project is dedicated to the themes of memory, tragedy, and the profound heroism of our nation, an example that is especially important today. The chronicle of the Siege holds a special significance for the citizens of Saint Petersburg — Leningrad, a city that its residents and defenders managed to preserve and protect for 900 days.

Siege photography consists of canonical images from newspapers: a blurred frame of a snow-covered tram, an unfocused 6×8 print, a snapshot taken from the window of a ruined apartment. And although it is impossible to fully imagine or comprehend the tragedy, each photograph presents the unquestionable value of human life — the greatness of the city’s feat, and the pain whose memory will never fade.

The exhibition features around 50 prints from the years 1941–1944. At its core is the famous “Leningrad Series” by Boris Kudoyarov, which shaped the visual canon of official Siege photography. An outstanding reportage photographer, he worked in Leningrad throughout all 900 days of the blockade. Thanks to his efforts, we have some of the most widely known and frequently reproduced images: women fighters of the local air-defense units, vegetable gardens near St. Isaac’s Cathedral, an artillery strike on Nevsky Prospect.

The exhibition also includes documentary photographs by photojournalists who worked with the TASS agency and the newspaper Leningradskaya Pravda — Vsevolod Tarasevich, Boris Utkín, Vladimir Kapustin. Together, their photographs create a detailed and expressive picture of life in the blockaded city. The diversity of the pictures arises from the distinctive styles of the photographers and the editorial tasks they were given. Personal photographs taken “as keepsakes”, group portraits and identity pictures preserved in nearly every family, draw the immense and seemingly distant history of the Siege nearer. Viewed through the experience of a single human life, the history suddenly becomes more tangible, intimate, and all the more tragic.

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The Feat of War Correspondents

This exhibition project is dedicated to honoring the courage and contribution of all wartime photojournalists who were assigned to the active army units during the Great Patriotic War and created the visual chronicle of the conflict. Among them were such authors as Y. Pyasetsky, S. Kolonin, P. Zhukovsky, E. Kopyt, A. Ditlov, B. Pushkin, K. Farafonov, V. Ivanov, S. Savenko, A. Fateev, B. Nevzorov, E. Evzerikhin, F. Kislov, I. Ozersky, B. Utkin, V. Fedoseev, B. Vilyashev, D. Trakhtenberg, L. Velikzhanin, E. Khaldei, S. Frilyand, M. Alpert, M. Redkin, A. Shaikhet.

he photographers we remember, and the many whose names have not survived, stood on the front line beside the soldiers, fighting shoulder to shoulder. Owing to their efforts, authentic images of the heroic chapters of our wartime history have come down to us, allowing viewers today to witness great and dramatic events of the past. Over the four years of the war, military photojournalists had created tens of thousands of negatives. They captured the intense battles of 1941, the bitterness of retreat and the first victories, the routines of front-line life and heroic labor, and the devastating traces of war in ruined cities and burned villages. The central figures in their photographs were ordinary soldiers and officers, those with whom the correspondent shared the hardships of war, marched into attack, and, risking his own life, recorded the pages of historical memory. Covering all four years of the Great Patriotic War, the exhibition dedicated to the collective feat of military correspondents presents the events they documented across all fronts — in Russia, Belarus, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Germany, and China.

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Yevgeny Khaldei. The Banner of Victory

This exhibition project presents a collection of the iconic wartime photograph by Yevgeny Khaldei.

Yevgeny Khaldei, a classic of Soviet wartime photography, was born in 1917 in Yuzovka (now Donetsk). He took his first photograph at the age of thirteen with a camera he constructed himself from two cardboard boxes and a lens taken from a pair of glasses. At eighteen, he began working as a photo correspondent for Ukrainian newspapers, and soon his photographs started appearing in the Moscow press. He gained recognition in the early 1940s, when he was already working as a military photo correspondent.

From 1939, Khaldei was a correspondent for TASS Photochronicle. He endured a long journey from Murmansk to Berlin — thousands of kilometers by ship, plane, car, tank, reindeer sled, and on foot along the roads of war. Hundreds of meters of film recorded Kerch, Novorossiysk, Rostov-on-Don, the Kuban, Yalta, Sevastopol, Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Austria, Germany, Potsdam, Harbin, Port Arthur, Paris, and Cannes. His ability to convey a person’s character and destiny through portraiture became a defining feature of his work. He created portraits of Soviet commanders, officers, soldiers, pilots, and sailors — both heroes and the ordinary people who bore the burden of war.

The work of Yevgeny Khaldei is inseparable from the history of the Second World War. It was through his photographs that the country grasped the full gravity of the war’s suffering, and some of these images were later presented as evidence at the Nuremberg Trials. He bore witness to how people lived and endured during the darkest years, when the fate of humanity was being decided. His photographs are not merely documentary evidence — they hold an emotional experience. The heroism and courage of ordinary people, the joy of victory and the pain of loss — Khaldei lived all of this himself. Yevgeny Khaldei’s work carries his own grief for his country, for its defeats and losses, with a fervent, unyielding hope to live to witness victory.

Of the 80 years he lived, Yevgeny Khaldei devoted 65 of them to photography. He said that he always photographed “with his heart and soul,” so that his images would speak to people today, tomorrow, and for generations to come.

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The Battle of Stalingrad. 200 Days of Fire

This chronologically structured exhibition tells the story of the heavy defensive battles of the summer of 1942 and the heroic defense of Stalingrad, the Soviet counteroffensive operation Uranus, the participation of the Guards units of the Stalingrad Front in the storming of Berlin, and, finally, the postwar reconstruction of the city.

The year 2023 marked the 80th anniversary of the end of the Battle of Stalingrad. One of the devastating battles in human history lasted exactly 200 days — from July 17, 1942 to February 2, 1943. The battle, which spanned vast territories of what are now the Voronezh, Rostov, and Volgograd regions and the Republic of Kalmykia, changed the course of history and became a turning point not only in the Great Patriotic War, but in the Second World War as a whole.

Many photographers carried out their duty, seeing the horrors of war not through a gunsight, but through the lens of a camera. The surviving frames of this photographic chronicle are a unique testament to the unparalleled courage of the soldiers of the Stalingrad Front. Thanks to the bravery of military photojournalists, portraits of the ordinary people who bore the burden of war, those who stopped the enemy in the Rostov steppes and at the walls of Stalingrad, have been preserved to this day, along with photographs of street battles, tragic images captured on the front lines, and shots from strategic military briefings.

The exhibition features works by distinguished Soviet photographers: Emmanuil Evzerikhin, Yakov Ryumkin, Vasily Malyshev, Dmitry Chernov, Alexander Smirnov, Georgy Lipskerov, Yevgeny Khaldei, Arkady Shaikhet, Alexander Fridlyand, Boris Vdovenko, Sergei Loskutov, Georgy Zelma, Grigory Kapustyansky, Yefim Kopyt, and others.

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Last updated on 11.11.2025