The sailor standing over his fallen enemy belonged to one of the most feared formations of the Red Army — the Soviet Naval Infantry. As the war swallowed the fleets' shore bases, tens of thousands of sailors were sent to fight on land, and they carried their navy identity with them: the dark blue jacket, the striped telnyashka undershirt, the ribboned cap. They fought with a ferocity that earned them a grim German nickname — Chyornaya Smert, "the Black Death." By 1945 men like him had fought all the way into the heart of Germany. Here he stands amid the wreckage of the enemy, a captured Nazi banner in his fists and a dead German at his feet — the Soviet image of "Victory over Fascism," the triumph the USSR still marks every ninth of May.

The two-figure set is the moment of triumph itself: the naval infantryman, a PPSh submachine gun slung across his chest, holding up a captured swastika banner as a trophy while a dead German lies sprawled at his boots. Now a retired King & Country release — no longer in production, and so increasingly sought after by collectors — it pairs with the Soviet supreme commander Marshal Stalin and the conference where the victors carved up their win, Yalta 1945, and it stands over the beaten enemy it depicts, the German soldiers of the Eastern Front like the Waffen-SS Grenadier at Kharkov. It is the emphatic final note of a Berlin 1945 diorama — the end of the Reich in two figures.

Model: RA079 / King & Country / 1/30 (60mm) scale / matte finish / 2 piece set (RETIRED)