Soviet WW II photography (1941 -1945) occupies a special place in world photography. For four years a large team of professionals was assigned to visually document a subject of previously unimagined scale, one that linked catastrophic events affecting millions of people on enormous expanses of territory - from the North Ice Ocean to the Caucasus, and from the Volga River to Berlin.

War photographs clearly bore the marks of the Soviet mentality and some recognizably echoed systematic propaganda. But the importance of official dogma faded in the light of the truths they revealed about the war and the people who fought it, lived through it, and died in it. Photojournalists recorded what they saw, as they saw it—during bombardments, or when freezing in the trenches, or as they passed the precious time of day with soldiers during a momentary lull. Simple stories took on sudden, unexpected, and altogether different colors as battles began or ended. Perhaps the most important feature of Soviet war photography was the undeniable humanism of each reporter’s response. This quality was not diminished by the brutality of the scenes that were shot or by the well-known and well-enforced official mandate to shoot only certain subjects. In terms of the dramatization of its subjects and illustrative expressiveness, Soviet photography made a great leap forward in its evolution during the four years of the war.