About

Soldier's Face After Four Years of War refers to two viral black-and-white photographs of a Soviet soldier taken in 1941 and 1945 after he returned home from World War II. The striking contrast between the two photographs led to their viral spread online and inspired memes in which they were humorously captioned, and the catchphrase of the original often being used for "before and after" pairs of images.

Origin

The photographs depict Soviet artist Evgeny Kobytev, who enlisted in Soviet Army in 1941 and returned home from WW2 in 1945. Kobytev, who graduated from an art institute shortly before the war, received a leg wound and became a prisoner of war at Nazi Germany's "Khorol Pit" concentration camp. After the war, Kobytev continued his work as an artist.^[1]

The photographs are displayed at the Andrey Pozdeev Museum in Krasnoyarsk, Russia, and were donated to the museum by Kobytev's daughter Vera (shown below).

On May 7th, 2020, Yandex Zen^[2] user Parnas on-line gallery posted an article about Kobytev, with the photographs displayed side-by-side used as the cover. The article was viewed over 59,000 times in two years (shown below).

On June 30th, 2020, Redditor montecelevio posted the photographs to the /r/pics^[3] subreddit, where they received over 109,000 upvotes in two years.

Spread

The photographs have frequently been reposted on Reddit and other social media in the following years. For example, on August 24th, 2021, Twitter^[4] account @archeohistories posted the photographs, with the tweet gaining over 1,000 retweets and 6,700 likes in one year.

On June 8th, 2022, Twitter^[5] user @metalinuei posted the earliest found meme using the caption, replacing the photographs with an image of a woman and a digitally altered version of it. The tweet gained over 2,600 retweets and 29,400 likes in six months (shown below).

On January 3rd, 2023, Twitter^[6] account Historic Vids (@historyinmemes) posted the image, captioning it, "Soldier’s face after four years of war, 1941-1945." The post went viral on Twitter, gaining over 14,500 retweets and 206,000 likes in four days.

The viral spread of the tweet was followed by memes in which users humorously captioned the photograph or kept the caption while replacing the images. For example, on January 3rd, 2023, Twitter^[7] user @InsaneLetterbox captioned the image, "Me after sitting through a 3 hour movie with no piss break," with the tweet gaining over 580 retweets and 11,500 likes in four days (shown below, left). On January 4th, Twitter^[8] user @joblessthursday captioned the image, "me after talking to my dad for ten minutes." The tweet garnered over 23,400 retweets and 172,600 likes in three days (shown below, right).

The meme format maintained popularity on Twitter through early January 2023.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References