Twice Hero of the Soviet Union Nikolai Skomorokhov 1945
Color images of the Russian Empire in Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii’s gorgeous photos, the goofy Romanovs and Olga Shirnina stirring colorized pictures of Russians in World War 1 take us back. In this gallery we see Olga’s work on photographs from World War 2.
Reichstag, Berlin 1945
Liberation Of Stalingrad 1943
Aleksandra Samusenko – (1922 – 3 March 1945) was a Soviet T-34 tank commander and a liaison officer during World War II.[1] She was the only female tankman in the 1st Guards Tank Army. Samusenko died from wounds in the then German village of Zülzefitz (70 km from Szczecin) during the East Pomeranian Offensive.
Partisan Grigory Ryabkov – 1943
Sniper Nikolay Ilyin, 494 kills
Natalya Meklin-Kravtsova –
By the end of the war she had flown 982 night missions and dropped an estimated 147 tons of bombs on enemy-controlled territory.
Soviet T-34 tanks on the streets of Lvov, 1944
Snipers of the third Byelorussian front (l to r): junior sergeant Maria Rozhkova, senior sergeant Roza Shanina, jr. sergeants Olga Mokshina, Eva Novikova, Anna Kuznetsova, Alexandra Ekimova, sr. sergeant Evdokia Krasnoborova, jr. sergeant Antonina Pryalkova, sr. sergeant Zinaida Shmeleva and jr. sergeant Lydia Vdovina.
Red Army traffic controller, Berlin 1945
Soviet combat medic, 1941
10 Nov 1942, Volkhov Front
Twice Hero of the Soviet Union Nikolai Skomorokhov 1945
Hero of the Soviet Union Evgeniya Rudneva -(24 December 1920 – 9 April 1944) was a Soviet military air navigator, a Hero of the Soviet Union, a member of the Moscow branch of the Astronomical-Geodesical Society of the USSR, and head of the Solar Department.
June 1945. Preparation for the Victory Parade.
46th Taman Guards Night Bomber Aviation Regiment.
From left to right: Rufina Gasheva, Irina Sebrova, Natalia Meklin, Marina Chechneva, Nadezhda Popova, Seraphima Amosova, Evdokia Nikulina, Evdokia Bershanskaya, Maria Smirnova, Evgeniya Zhigulenko
Soviet submachine gunners among the destroyed houses during the battle of Stalingrad 1942
Georgy Zhukov – 1939
Lyudmila Pavlichenko
Hero of the Soviet Union Piotr Dziuba
The center of Stalingrad, winter 1943
Soviet women clearing away the debris in bomb ravaged cities
“Their padded cotton jackets were grease stained and threadbare… These were, indeed, the men of the armies which had fought and beaten two-thirds of Germany’s land forces on the Eastern Front while the magnificently equipped British and Americans had trouble enough dealing with the other third in Normandy, Italy, and along the Siegfried Line. They were stocky, hard-faced peasants and herdsmen from the Steppes. They looked inured to hardship,” Australian war correspondent Osmar White described the victors.
Yevdokia Bershanskaya, commander of the 46th Taman Guards Night Bomber Aviation Regiment, instructs the crew – Yevdokia Nosal and Nina Ulyanenko, 1942
Central Women’s School of Sniper Training, 1943
In March, 1942 a Central Women’s School of Sniper Training was established in Vishniaki, a village 8.7 miles outside Moscow. The school recruited women aged 18-26, physically fit, with at least seven years of education. School Director was Nora P. Chegodayeva, a graduate of the famous Frunze Military Academy who had fought as a communist volunteer in the Spanish Civil War. By the end of the war, the school graduated 1,885 snipers and instructors.
Berlin 1945
Berlin 1945
Tank driver Mikhail Smirnov, 1944
See more of Olga Shirnina’s work on her website.