On October 8th, an exhibition of unique archive photos “Liberation. Path towards the Victory. The Rear” opened in the hall of the third floor in the main building of South Ural State University. Among the authors of the photos are legendary photojournalists of the Soviet Information Bureau: Ivan Shagin, Aleksandr Ustinov, and Yakov Khalip. The exhibition is organized by Rossiya Segodnya international media group, with the support from the Presidential Grants Fund.
The photographs depict the scenes of labour feats by workers of the Soviet rear during the years of the Great Patriotic War. The images show not only workshops of the plants evacuated to Chelyabinsk, but also other industrial giants from the cities of Yaroslavl, Gorky, Kuybyshev, and there is even a photo from the Blockaded Leningrad.
This exhibition is organized in different cities across Russia (from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok), as well as in Belarus.
SUSU President Aleksandr Shestakov delivered a speech at the exhibition opening ceremony.
“Soon we will be celebrating the 80th anniversary of the Great Victory. And our country gained it at a very high price,” said Aleksandr Shestakov. “The South Ural region indeed played a huge role in this victory as well. During the wartime, more than one million people were enlisted in the Red Army, and one fourth of them died. Here the legendary Urals Volunteer Tank Corps was formed.”
The SUSU President urged students to learn about their family history and look up to their ancestors regarding valour and patriotism.
Representatives of Rossiya Segodnya group presented Aleksandr Shestakov with eight volumes of communiques of the Soviet Information Bureau as of 1941–45 to be handed over to the university library collection.
The exhibition organizer and project coordinator of Rossiya Segodnya media group Kirill Ibragimov shared that this is not the first exhibition of military photos created by the media group. First they held an exhibit dedicated to the liberation of the Soviet territories from fascists. The exhibition about the feat of homefront workers is a continuation of this cycle.
“We’ve had episodes when a person passing by the exhibited photos would recognize the house where his grandfathers and grandmothers lived and shared that in this very house his grandfathers and grandmothers helped the Jewish people hide from the Germans,” explained Kirill Ibragimov. “While demonstrating these photos we’ve suddenly realized that our whole people contributed to this victory. This was how this exhibition was created. Its task is to show not only the contribution by the Ural region, which was forging the victory, but also the contribution by Moscow, Yaroslavl, Nizhny Novgorod, and Samara.”
SUSU veteran Anatoly Shkolnikov and the Head of the Museum of SUSU History Nadezhda Ivanova also spoke at the exhibition’s opening ceremony.
“The exhibition opens right in the time when the Chelyabinsk Region reveres the memory of the heroes of Tankograd,” said deputy of the State Duma of the Russian Federation Oleg Golikov in his greeting speech at SUSU. “For us, residents of the South Ural region, this is a source of particular pride for our fathers and grandfathers who often remain in the background of more well-known battle victories. I’m sure this exhibition will be of great interest to students and guests of the university.”
In the end of the opening ceremony, producer of the Directorate for Visual Projects of Rossiya Segodnya media group Olga Mangush gave a tour around the exhibition for students of the SUSU Institute of Media, Social Sciences and Humanities.