In the center of Moscow opened the exhibition “They fought for the Motherland!”

Exhibition of People’s Artist of the USSR, Academician of the Russian Academy of Arts Alexander Shilov “They fought for their Motherland!” opened on the Arbat – opposite the Vakhtangov Theatre.

The exhibition is dedicated to the participants of the Great Patriotic War, intelligence officers, counterintelligence officers, pilots, home front workers, ordinary soldiers who fought for their Motherland. On the stands are portraits of dozens of participants in the Great Patriotic War, painted by Alexander Shilov since the 1970s, these are the faces of the best people of the era. Next to each portrait is a story or story about the hero of the work, famous or known only to the artist.

The grand opening of the exhibition was held to the sounds of a military orchestra. The solemn ceremony was conducted by the People’s Artist of the RSFSR, the legendary announcer and TV presenter, Anna Nikolaevna Shatilova. The ceremony was attended by heads of the country’s military departments, veterans of the Great Patriotic War and veterans of intelligence, students of cadet classes in Moscow schools. “The heroes look at us from Shilov’s paintings and seem to ask: will we be worthy of them, will we be able to complete their work? – said at the opening of the exhibition the head of the Moscow Department of Culture Alexander Kibovsky, – I am sure that we can do it!

Pilots, home front workers, soldiers, scouts – Alexander Shilov started creating this portrait gallery while studying at the Surikov Institute and continues to this day. And now the artist plans a new task. “Tomorrow I’m going to Vishnevsky’s hospital. There will be such a small exhibition, and I will speak to the soldiers who are being treated there. My dream and task is to find a hero for myself in order to write it, ”said Alexander Shilov, People’s Artist of the USSR.

There are more than 40 portraits at the exhibition, and the gallery of heroes continues to grow. Talking about the portrait of Colonel General Grigory Grigorenko, who during the war as part of SMERSH fought against saboteurs, after the war he was engaged in counterintelligence in the Middle East, in the 60s he created a system that made it possible to reveal foreign intelligence agents, the artist was very sorry that he had to paint a portrait of Grigorenko from the photo – by the time he started working, the general was no longer alive … And here is another hero of Shilov’s portrait – a colonel, a veteran of the Great Patriotic War and the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, an honorary officer of state security, a cavalier of orders of the Patriotic War of the 1st degree and the Red Star, the owner of three medals “For Military Merit” Ivan Pavlovich Evtodiev, fortunately, is alive and well, and every year he comes to the Arbat opening days on the Arbat, tells the youth about the great feat of our soldiers.

We look at the pictures, and we are surprised – what bright, beautiful faces! On January 18, 1945, the Nazis were preparing to distribute explosives around the city and blow it up. Here is a portrait of a young lieutenant Alexei Botyan – the prototype of the legendary Major Whirlwind in the film of the same name – he recruited a scout who blew up an ammunition depot, and the enemies had nothing to carry out this blasphemous plan. And here is a participant in the military parade on November 7, 1941, and then the defender of Leningrad, Moscow, Stalingrad, who took Koenigsberg, Berlin Vasily Chumakov – a calm, confident man in a tunic, chest in orders and medals. The next portrait is a modest dark dress with a white turn-down collar, only one medal, and the look of a blockade woman that cannot be confused with any other: Ekaterina Nikolaevna Ivanova sewed uniforms in besieged Leningrad, extinguished incendiary bombs on its roofs, dug trenches on the outskirts of the city. Here they are, simple modest heroes of the home front, without whom there would be no Great Victory!

Shilov painted a portrait of the English intelligence officer George Blake, who received forty years in prison in his homeland, but managed to move to the USSR. The playwright Viktor Rozov also fought for the Motherland – first leading a front-line propaganda team, and after the war defending the honor and dignity of a person in his plays. Here is a portrait of the famous pilot Nadezhda Popova, who made 852 night sorties during the war years, portraits of cultural figures who participated in the Second World War – Yevgeny Matveev, Sergei Bondarchuk, Yan Frenkel, Vladimir Etush, Sergei Mikhalkov, who was a war correspondent for the newspaper “For the Glory of the Motherland” . It is he who owns the epitaph on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier near the Kremlin wall: “Your name is unknown, your deed is immortal.”

The head of the press bureau of the Foreign Intelligence Service, Sergei Nikolayevich Ivanov, also saw familiar faces in the pictures: “Aleksey Nikolayevich is a man who went through the partisan paths throughout the Great Patriotic War. The apotheosis of his feat was the salvation of the Polish city of Krakow. The next hero, scout Vitaly Korotkov, ran away to the front twice as an eighth grader, but he was caught and returned home. After another attempt to escape, his father, a general of the armored forces, promised that he would help him get a job at the front if his son passed the exams for five. 14-year-old Vitaly became one of the participants in the historically turning point Battle of Kursk, and after the war he began working in political intelligence. The bright memory of the scouts about their comrade remained in our hearts. I am happy to walk around this exposition and greet my senior friends and senior colleagues,” Sergey Ivanov noted.

Photo exhibition “They fought for the Motherland!” as a living memory and gratitude to all those who valiantly defended the Fatherland in the terrible time of the war. “On the exploits that they performed in order to save and protect our Motherland, our people must be educated and raised as future defenders of the Fatherland!” – says People’s Artist of the USSR, Academician of the Russian Academy of Arts Alexander Shilov.

You can see the portraits of the heroes of the Fatherland on the Arbat until May 31.

Mikhail Kovalyov.

Author’s photo