Jewgeni Chaldej

Jewgeni Chaldej

Jewgeny Chaldej 1995. © Ernst Volland

Jewgeny Chaldej was born in 1917 in the Donezk region (Ukraine). At the age of 12 he built his first camera. Since 1936 Chaldej worked as a photo reporter for the news agency TASS.

During World War II he accompanied – initially as a simple soldier, and later as a lieutenant – the troops of the Red Army.

Chaldej was a soldier and photographer to witness the “Great Patriotic War” – whether on the northern front in Murmansk or in the south of the Black Sea. Finally, he also documented the retreat of the Hitlers army and the advance of the Soviet army in Belgrade, Budapest, Vienna and Berlin. He worked also as a photojournalist at the Potsdam Conference (1945) and the Nuremberg Trials (1946) . After the war he worked intermittently until in the seventies for the TASS and the “Pravda”.

Yevgeny Chaldej died at the age of eighty years on 6 October 1997 in Moscow.