MOSCOW – Viktor Didenko was born in Harbin in 1935, where his family lived while his father worked on the construction of the China Eastern Railway. This alone led him, at the age of 15, to flee from the NKVD (Soviet secret police) as a defacto “enemy of the people”. If he hadn’t had fled, his fate would have been imprisonment, or execution.
Al Jazeera: The forgotten Harbin operation
Picture released on August 1945 of Japanese soldiers laying down arms in front of Soviet officers as Russian army invades and liberates Manchuria from Japan, during the Second World War.
