Nature Tee

Before he became a symbol of Soviet defiance, Vasily Zaytsev was a shepherd’s son from the Ural Mountains, raised with a rifle in his hands. He learned to shoot hunting deer across miles of open snowfields, where ammo was precious and so were mistakes. When Hitler’s armies surged toward the Volga River in 1942, Zaytsev volunteered for the front. He wasn’t a sniper then—just another sailor turned infantryman. But in the rubble of Stalingrad, something in him awakened. The city was dying, street by street, building by building. So Zaytsev began to fight fire with ice. Armed with a standard Mosin-Nagant rifle—no fancy optics—he crawled into bombed-out buildings, sewers and chimneys, while turning the twisted metal of a shattered city into his hunting ground. He waited hours in the cold, motionless, breathing through cloth to avoid being spotted by his breath. Over the next few months, he racked up over 225 confirmed kills—officers, artillery observers, machine gunners. While doing so, he