To live, fight and create - Arkashev Vasily Ivanovich

20 june 2024

Interesting

Vasily Ivanovich Arkashev, photo correspondent, member of the USSR Union of Journalists, Honored Worker of Culture of Belarus, awarded two Orders of the Red Star (1944, 1945), the Order of Patriotic War II degree (1985), medals. He was born on April 26, 1914 in the village of Radichi, Roslavl uyezd, Smolensk region. In 1933 he graduated from the courses of photographic press-bureau in Kharkov. In 1936 he was drafted into the army, after which he became a photo correspondent for the newspaper of the Belorussian Military District «Krasnoarmeyskaya Pravda».

From the first to the last day of the Great Patriotic War Vasily Arkashev was in the army. Being a photo correspondent of the 3rd Belorussian Front newspaper «Let's Destroy the Enemy», he traveled from Minsk to Moscow in 1941 and back - through Gzhatsk, Smolensk, the Belarusian towns of Ozarichi, Kalinkovichi, Bobruisk and finished his frontline chronicle in Koenigsberg.

Among his famous shots are the falling Nazi German stormtrooper Hs 129 («The Last Peak», 1942) and «Hello, Mother Belarus!» (1944).

V. Arkashev reminded that during the war years photo reporters did not have good equipment with interchangeable telephoto lenses with which they could shoot the battlefield from a distance, so they had to move closer to the epicenter of events: «It was impossible to go further than 30-35 meters away from the subject, and naturally, photojournalists took great risks».

In the post-war years he continued to work in the military press in Minsk, and in 1971 he became a photo correspondent of the creative studio of the Union of Journalists of Belarus «Photo and Life».

In 1969 V. Arkashev's album «On the Frontline Roads» was published. Continuing the narrative about the fates of war heroes, he wrote a book of documentary stories «We met in battle».

Front photos taken by Vasily Arkashev are a kind of chronicle of the Great Patriotic War. At the international competition of the newspaper «Pravda» in 1975 they were awarded the first prize. At the All-Union exhibition dedicated to the 30th anniversary of the Victory - a silver medal and a diploma of the 2nd degree.

Based on the materials of the Standing Committee of Union State

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