Abdulkhakim Ismailov was 93 years old when he passed away on February 16th 2010. The former Red Army soldier who featured in the celebrated photograph of Russian soldiers raising the hammer-and-sickle flag over the Reichstag in Berlin in 1945. Three soldiers appear in the snapshot, which photographer Yevgeny Khaldei later admitted had been staged, after the original Soviet flag at the Reichstag was shot away by German snipers. Ismailov is the man at the bottom of the photo punching his arm out, as a comrade tentatively hoists the flag while balanced precariously atop the building. Ismailov was identified in 1996 and awarded a Hero of Russia medal – which he had failed to win in wartime, when, as part of a motorised infantry battalion, he was wounded five times, including at Stalingrad in 1942.
Perhaps not as widely acclaimed as the 5 who raised the Stars & Stripes over Iwo Jima but nevertheless for me one of the iconic images of WW2. May he rest in peace.
