War and Remembrance

A slug of vodka at his lips, a chunk of apple in his hand, Yevgeny Khaldei sets forth his mission. “Let them see,” he says.

Let them see these two bent women in a courtyard full of corpses. Let them see these lonely sailors playing with a yipping dog. Let them see the smoking cities. Let them see the ruined men.

Let them see the senseless pain, and let them learn the truth of war.

Such is the hope of the man who may be Russia’s most celebrated combat photographer.

Khaldei’s images shudder with the stress and strain of war. Now, for the first time, they are reaching a broad audience in America. Independent exhibits at the Jewish Museum here and in New York are drawing big crowds. And the New York-based Aperture Foundation is putting together a book of his work to be published this fall.

Khaldei, 80, admits to staging some of his shots. Others, he amped by fiddling with the negatives in his lab. So there’s some debate about whether his black-and-white record of World War II qualifies as documentary journalism. There’s no debate, however, about the power of his images.

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The photographs ring with the question that haunts him even today: Why war?

Khaldei, a short man with wispy white hair and thick glasses, has reflected plenty. Shooting bullets as well as pictures, he slogged alongside Soviet troops for every one of the 1,481 days his country battled Nazi Germany.

He bunked with reindeer in the Arctic Circle and whipped across enemy skies in a fighter plane. He saw cities burn. He suffered and he documented and he witnessed until he and his comrades marched triumphantly into Berlin on May 2, 1945.

There he staged his most famous picture, directing a Soviet soldier to hoist a Soviet flag over the Reichstag, the vanquished Nazi headquarters.

That shot is in both museums’ exhibits--along with companion pictures showing how Khaldei manipulated his fellow soldiers into position to get the most dramatic image. Later, Soviet censors ordered him to airbrush into oblivion one of the two watches the flag-hoister was wearing so it would not look as though the soldier had been looting.

Khaldei tinkered with other photos as well, pushing clouds around or adding smoke--and, in one famous case, splicing together two negatives to create the striking image of a forlorn reindeer twisting to watch as bombers rip through the sky and an explosion rocks the tundra.

Describing himself as a “director” as well as a journalist, Khaldei insists he did not compromise his documentary work when he asked soldiers to walk past a certain stream or when he darkened a too-cheery sky. His job was to make people see the truth of the war through striking images, he says.

“Combining two negatives is no big sin,” Khaldei told an applauding crowd at the Jewish Museum San Francisco. “The important thing is to create a picture people want to see.”

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That philosophy alarms veteran American combat photographer Bryan Grigsby. Setting up a shot is acceptable if the result is clearly labeled art or propaganda, he said--but staged photos cannot be passed off as documentary journalism. Neither can images manipulated in the lab.

American photographers did stage shots during the Civil War and the Spanish-American War, said Grigsby, now a photo editor for the Philadelphia Inquirer and curator of an exhibit on war photography at the National Archives.

The curators and collectors who are promoting Khaldei’s work in the United States acknowledge that his techniques raise questions about the nature of documentary work. But they insist that the photos offer a powerful--and fundamentally honest--window to the Russian perspective on World War II.

“He took some artistic license because it was very important to him to get his point across,” San Francisco curator Joan Perlman said, “but I don’t think he really compromised the truth of it.”

Because he spent much of his time with the Soviet soldiers who chased the retreating Germans across Europe, Khaldei rarely captured actual firefights on film. So although his images singe with the horror of a war that killed 20 million of his countrymen--including his father and three sisters--they are also oddly quiet.

“He came upon the destroyed cities, the wounded soldiers, the lost citizens, the corpses,” explained Susan Goodman, curator of the New York show. “The aftermath of war. That’s what he captured.”

Though he found endless suffering in the war, Khaldei also found freedom.

Before the war, he produced the obligatory images of strong workers building a mighty Communist state under the courageous guidance of benevolent leaders. After, the censors got so restrictive that he needed a permit to photograph outside.

But during the war, the Soviet government allowed Khaldei and the 50 other combat photographers to snap away at will, on the theory that citizens would rally to support their troops once they saw for themselves the momentous task of beating back fascism. Free for once to take truly candid shots, Khaldei was able to capture the fear and the pain, the loneliness and the swagger, the exhaustion and the exultation of war.

Though he clearly revered his comrades in arms--he can still recite the names and fates of nearly every soldier in his photos--Khaldei did not set them all up as heroes in front of his lens. Instead, he documented their human sides: how they scrawled their names onto the Reichstag marble, and how they smiled at the gag of killing a German civilian who persisted in styling his hair and mustache like Hitler’s after Berlin fell. Khaldei even took candids of a relaxed-looking Stalin at postwar peace conferences.

“I have just always wanted people to know,” he once said, “what really happened in their own time.”

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Khaldei’s own story tells much about his time. His mother was killed in a pogrom against Jews in the first year of the Soviet regime. Khaldei dropped out of elementary school to work in a steel mill during the famine that gripped Ukraine after Stalin wiped out private farming in 1929. He later lost two journalism jobs during anti-Semitic surges.

Khaldei received no formal training in photography. As a teenager, he made his first camera from a cardboard box and his grandmother’s glasses. Then he taught himself to use it.

During the war, Khaldei clicked his German-made Leica at the enemy as well as at his own people. One of his prized images captures two dazed Germans sitting, uncomprehending, in the ruins of vanquished Berlin. “He had enough humanity in him to relate to them,” said Alexander Nakhimovsky, a Russian emigre who arranged the first U.S. show of Khaldei’s work, at Colgate University in New York in 1995.

Indeed, Khaldei had altogether too much humanity in him for the Soviet censors, who suppressed some of his pictures from the Nuremberg war crimes trials. Their objection: Khaldei’s photos showed Hitler’s henchmen as human beings, not as monsters.

Much as he rails against the savagery of combat, Khaldei, like many Russians of his generation, looks back on World War II with a wistful nostalgia.

He remembers the war as a time of camaraderie, when soldiers of all ethnicities and religions fought side by side under the red banner of the Soviet Army. He remembers, too, the pride of seeing his nation united behind the noble goal of defeating fascism. Sacrifice was glorious. Suffering had meaning. Russia was great.

“Nothing of that is left,” Khaldei said sadly. “Everything is destroyed.”

Indeed, the red flag Khaldei fought for--and photographed for--no longer flies over the Kremlin. To visit his comrades from onetime Soviet republics like Kazakhstan, he must cross into a foreign country. Russia seems to him a shambles, and so he feels he can no longer work.

“What would you like me to photograph today? Love? Sex?” Khaldei asks in disgust. “I have photographed today’s Russia and it is not good.”

* The exhibit at the Jewish Museum San Francisco, 121 Steuart St., runs through July 17. For information: (415) 543-8880. The New York exhibit, 1109 Fifth Ave., runs through April 13. For information: (212) 423-3200.