Artist: LAIBACH
Album: LAIBACH REINDEER (TS)

Year:
Media type: TS/LS

The motive for these T shirt is the famous ‘Murmansk Reindeer’ photo, taken by Yevgeni Khaldev, the same photographer who captured the staged raising of the hammer & sickle at the Reichtag, Germany - May 2, 1945. Though admitting the famous photo showing the reindeer silhouetted on an overcast Murmansk sky, Hawker Hurricanes unleashing ordinance overhead is indeed a composite, Khaldei is insistent on the underlying veracity of his image. There was in fact a reindeer that showed up during air raids, and he tells the story that inspired the famous edit: ‘During the bombings, a reindeer came out of the tundra. He wanted to be with people. They built him a shed to live in, and gave him a name, Yasha. Every time the alarm sounded, he ran to be with the soldiers as he apparently didn’t want to be alone. During one of the air raids, I took this shot. In 1944, when the battle for Murmansk was over, the soldiers didn’t know what to do with him. They loaded him into a truck and took him back to the tundra, thinking he would join the other deer. But he couldn’t understand what was happening. He ran after the truck as long as he could.’