Ransom Center exhibit highlights Soviet sacrifice in WWII
Austin American-Statesman (Austin, Texas)
July 9, 2005
By JIM VERTUNO, Associated Press Writer
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) – Leaping from the rubble of a bombed out building,
the Soviet soldier joins two comrades fighting their way through the
streets of Stalingrad in 1942.
No faces. No names. Fate unknown. Just three shapes, pushing out of the
shadows and fog, carrying rifles as they struggle through tough,
house-to-house combat with the Germans in one of the bloodiest battles
of World War II.
The photograph by Georgi Zelma is one of 49 on display in the “Battle
for the Eastern Front” exhibit running through July 17 at the University
of Texas’ Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center.
Culled from the private collection of Texas Monthly founder, author and
movie screenwriter Williams Broyles Jr. and other photos he donated to
the Ransom Center, the exhibit illustrates the war on the Eastern Front
and the sacrifices the Soviets endured to drive Hitler’s armies back to
Berlin.
The exhibit opened May 9 to coincide with Russia’s 60th anniversary of
“Victory Day,” the Soviet Union’s defeat of Germany in the conflict the
Soviets called “The Great Patriotic War.”
Broyles, a Vietnam veteran, is the son of a World War II Marine veteran
and the father of an Air Force pararescue jumper who will soon start his
third tour in Iraq. Broyles said he’s long been interested in war
photography but only in the last few years was drawn to the battle on
the Eastern Front, where some accounts put Soviet losses at a staggering
25 million people.
Broyles had seen a famous photograph of a soldier lifting the Soviet
hammer and sickle flag over the burned out Reichstag in Berlin – one of
the searing images of the war – but said he knew little of the ferocity
of the fighting there.
“We grew up in the Cold War and the Soviet Union was our enemy,” Broyles
said. “Once you peel away the ideological conflict of the Cold War and
see the absolute horrors of the experience of the Russian soldier, it
took all of us to win World War II but we here in America, we don’t have
a good idea of what happened in the East.
“I’m not saying my father and his friends didn’t do everything they
could, only that the Russians did so much,” Broyles said.
Hitler’s armies invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941 and pushed to
within 20 miles of Moscow – the capital city was literally within the
Germans’ sights – before the Soviets launched a massive counterattack.
Initially welcomed in some areas as liberators from Joseph Stalin’s
communist regime, the Nazis quickly squandered the goodwill with a
brutal campaign that terrorized conquered territories and spawned
widespread resistance.
The exhibit traces the war from the German invasion in 1941 through its
retreat and the Soviet push into Germany in 1945. It culminates with the
Soviet capture of Berlin, including the image of the red flag over the
Reichstag and another famous shot of a Soviet tank at the Brandenburg Gate.
The tank is in the foreground, making it appear very large when set
against the background of the damaged gate.
“It becomes this remarkably powerful symbol of allied victory and at the
same time a warning for the West as a whole of the imminent power of the
Soviet Union. It’s a very complex image,” said David Coleman, the Ransom
Center’s associate curator of photography.
The collection includes many powerful photographs, some of which have
never been seen in the West. In one image of intense grief, a woman
searches a field full of dead bodies for a loved one. In another that
expresses hope, a man carrying an orchestra bass stumbles though the
wreckage in Stalingrad.
Several images come from the battle for Stalingrad, which left some two
million soldiers dead, wounded or missing.
“Death was like a beast. I wanted only one thing – to kill,” Soviet
Armenian veteran (of Armenian descent) Suren Mirzoyan recalled in a
postwar interview, quoted in the exhibit. “Every step in Stalingrad
meant death. Death was in our pockets. Death was walking with us.”
In two of Broyles’ favorites images, an infantryman says goodbye to his
girlfriend before leaving for the front and a partisan fighter bids
farewell to his mother. A large difference between the American and
Soviet experiences of World War II was that the Soviets fought and died
on their own land in a conflict that took a heavy toll on civilians as
well as soldiers.
“In those pictures, it’s just as likely the mother and the girlfriend
would be killed,” Broyles said. “The war was fought in and for their
villages and towns.”
Broyles has traveled to Russia and the Ukraine to visit some of the
battlegrounds featured in the exhibit and has talked with war veterans
there.
“That war is still alive for them,” he said. “When Americans went to
war, we were fighting an idealistic crusade for freedom. We weren’t also
fighting to make sure our families back home were wiped out. It was
national survival for them.”
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From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress