In March 1918, when Khaldei was one year old, his mother was killed during one of the pogroms of the Russian Civil War, by followers of the White movement.

During the march to Berlin with the advancing Red Army, Khaldei experienced the liberation of Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary, and the capture of Vienna.

[5] Khaldei continued to work in photojournalism after the war as a TASS staff photographer, but was reprimanded in a 1947 evaluation: "After returning to peacetime conditions, he failed to develop himself at all, and at the present moment he is considered a passable photojournalist ...

His work was also admired by the elites of the Soviet Union and he is renowned for creating commissioned portraits for State leaders such as Joseph Stalin, Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin.

[citation needed] Khaldei's most famous photo was of a Red Army soldier raising a Soviet flag above the German Reichstag at the end of World War II: the historic defeat of Nazi Germany in a war that cost the Soviet Union twenty million lives; the magazine Ogoniok published the photograph on 13 May 1945.

[11] The celebrated image is a re-enactment of an earlier flag-raising of which no photograph was taken, as it happened at 10:40 p.m. on 30 April 1945 while the building was actually still held by German troops.

A group of four Soviet soldiers fought their way to the roof, where 23-year-old private Mikhail Minin climbed up on an equestrian statue representing Germany, to fasten an improvised flagpole to its crown.

It was confirmed in 2015 in the court session between the heiress of the photographer, his daughter Anna Khaldei and the publishing house «Veche» about the use of the photograph "Raising a Flag over the Reichstag" in the book "Za porogom Pobedy" (Russian: За порогом Победы, Behind the Threshold of the Victory) by Arsen Benikovich Martirosyan, where ITAR-TASS was included as a third party without a separate interest.