About

Evgeny Khaldey (Named Efim at birth)

 

10th of March, 1917 – He was born in the city of Yuzovka, Ukraine (then the city of Stalino, now Donetsk, Ukraine).

1918 – During a Jew massacre, his mother dies, covering her one-year-old son with herself. Efim is wounded, he is nursed and brought up by his grandparents.

1925-1930 – He studies at an elementary Jewish school, heder.

1930 – Since the age of 13, escaping from the Holodomor, he is working as an auxiliary worker in a locomotive depot, in the evenings he helps in a local photo studio. He makes his first camera from a cardboard box and with his grandma’s eyeglasses.

1931 – He takes the first photos with a homemade camera: the Transfiguration Cathedral in the city of Stalino before it was destroyed and after that.

1932 – He buys his first own camera,”Fotokor No. 1″, which has just begun to be produced in the USSR.

He travels in the Donbas region where he photographs the heroes of Socialist labour and the everyday life of a Soviet citizens. His glass negatives are sent to a local newspapers and to the capital’s «Soyuzfoto»  trust. Many of his shots are published in the central press.

1935 – He was invited to Moscow to attend the «Soyuzphoto» photojournalists’ courses.

1936 – He starts working as aTASS (the famous state-owned news agency) staff. Moves to Moscow. Numerous business trips to the USSR.

1937-1939 – He serves in the border troops in Karelia and on the Tien Shan.

1940 – The last meeting with his father and younger sisters who were murdered by the Nazi during the war in his home city Stalino.

1941-1945 – As a war correspondent for TASS, he was sent to the Arctic, then to the Black Sea Fleet (Crimea, Rostov-on-Don, Kuban, Caucasus, etc.). With the troops of the active army through Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Hungary and Austria, he reaches Berlin. He ends the war in Port Arthur. He films the signing of the surrender of nazi Germany, the work of the Potsdam Conference and the disarmament of militaristic Japan, the Victory Parade in Red Square. During the years of the Great Patriotic War, he was awarded nine medals and orders of the Red Star and the Patriotic War, received many awards for his extraordinary works in combat conditions.

1945-1946 – Marries a colleague from the “Sovinformburo” Svetlana. For almost a year he is working as a military commander at the Nuremberg trials, where his photographs of burned Murmansk, destroyed Sevastopol and executed in the courtyard of the Rostov prison were presented as evidence of Nazi crimes.

1948 – During the campaign against cosmopolitanism, he was dismissed from TASS.

For more than 10 years he is working as a freelance correspondent for a different newspapers an magasins , such as “Club and Amateur Art”, “USSR at the construction site”, “Rural Life”; in VOX (All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Abroad), etc.

1959 – He gets a job at the newspaper «Pravda». Travels a lot around the Soviet Union, reports on current topics: the life of the Soviet republics, industry, national economy, holidays. Designs and develops a column for searching heroes of the war “Who will call their names?”

1972 – Works for the newspaper “Soviet Culture”. Organises two photo exhibitions: “1418 days” and “From Murmansk to Berlin”, which were widely shown in many museums of the country.

1975 – «Ogonyok» and «Freie Welt» invites him to Berlin with the participants of his legendary group photo at the Brandenburg Gate in May 1945.

1985 – Holds a number of exhibitions in the cities of the Soviet Union dedicated to the 40th anniversary of theVictory in the Great Patriotic War, “From Murmansk to Berlin” and “100 photographs of Konstantin Simonov”.

1994-1997 – A series of solo exhibitions in Europe and America.

1994 – A trip to Berlin by the invitation of German television to film a reportage on the Reicstag’s rooftop, where in May 1945 his iconic photo “Victory Banner”was taken.

1995 Was awarded the title Officer «Order of Arts and Letters» at the International Photojournalism Festival in Perpignan (France).

6th of October, 1997 – A week after returning from his solo exhibition in Belgium, he passes away in Moscow.