UrBC, Yekaterinburg, June 26, 2015. A photo exhibition called To Remember Is to Live opened at Uralvagonzavod Corporation/UVZ Museum. Glory Square in Nizhniy Tagil serves as the central focus of all the photographs on display, the corporation’s press service reports.

The better part of this photo archive was collected and digitalized by Nikolai Mitin. There are fifty photographs in the exhibition: works by Mashinostroitel news photographers Vladimir Mikheyenko and Lyudmila Ivanova from various time periods and by head of local Tourist Photographer Club Vladimir Mitin.

‘The exhibition opens in the summer so as to give the younger generation a chance to see it in their free time. Our target audience is children from elementary and middle schools who are now at local camps, and sports and hobby clubs. Anyone interested in photography and the history of Nizhniy Tagil is welcome to come and appreciate the local photographers’ work,’ the press service says.

The exhibition features some quite rare shots, including those of laying a memorial stone in Glory Square in 1967. The square memorial came to replace a cantonment that was there at the beginning, with makeshift shelters observable in the earliest photographs. Some of the pictures present the main stages in the construction of the memorial: the mounting of a commemorative pylon and the unveiling of the-tank-trooper-and-the-tank-builder monument. A time capsule for the generations to come was placed within the pylon, which bears the names of all the locals who perished in the war. In 1970, the Eternal Fire was kindled in the square for the first time; it was also in that year that the graves of soldiers who had gone away at a nearby hospital were relocated.