Combat (photograph)

Combat is a black-and-white photograph by the Soviet photographer Max Alpert. It depicts a Soviet military officer armed with a TT pistol who is raising his unit for an attack during World War II. This work is regarded as one of the most iconic Soviet World War II photographs, yet neither the date nor the subject is known with certainty. According to the most widely accepted version, the photograph depicts Aleksei Gordeyevich Yeryomenko, minutes before his death on 12 July 1942.

History
Over the years Alpert gave a few contradictory versions of the event, with dates ranging from Autumn 1941 to 1943. He was consistent in that he did not know the officer's name, and that the photograph's title Combat ("Commander of a battalion") was likely inaccurate – after he took it, he overheard that "the combat is killed" and tentatively associated this message with the subject of the photograph. After the war Alpert received numerous letters claiming identification of the officer, but only one was confirmed by a joint investigation by Komsomolskaya Pravda and administration of Lugansk Oblast undertaken in the 1970s. According to this reconstructed version, Yeryomenko was the political commissar in his unit. When the commander got wounded, he took command and raised the unit for a counterattack against the German offence. He died within minutes after that.

Legacy
The photograph was reused in numerous publications, sculptures, artworks and commercial products, both in the Soviet Union and abroad.