Karmen wasn't "Russian"...there was no "Russia" at the time. He was Soviet (Putin. like Stalin, was also Soviet).
"He enrolled in the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography, Moscow, in 1929. Throughout the 1930s, Karmen worked at the Central Studio of Documentary Film and as a correspondent for Soviet newspapers, including Pravda and Izvestii. He participated in the exhibition Film und Foto, mounted in Stuttgart in 1929, as well as the Exposition internationale de la photographie contemporaine (International exhibition of contemporary photography), at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, in 1936. During World War II, Karmen was present on the front lines, documenting the Leningrad blockade, the surrender of German field marshal Friedrich Paulus in Volgograd, and the liberation of the Majdanek concentration camp in Lublin. The Soviet Union awarded Karmen the Lenin Prize, the highest Soviet honor, for his 1953 film Story of the Caspian Oil Workers."
Abbaspour, Mitra, Lee Ann Daffner, and Maria Morris Hambourg.
Object: Photo. Modern Photographs: The Thomas Walther Collection 1909–1949 at The Museum of Modern Art. December 8, 2014. moma.org/objectphoto
