The museum’s collection houses a copy of a photograph “On the Roof of the Reichstag” taken by an unknown photographer in Berlin in 1945. In the background, there is smoke left after an aerial battle, and in the foreground is the red Victory Banner raised by Soviet soldiers over the Reichstag building. A Senior lieutenant Vladimir Rubtsov and his comrade-in-arms stand by the side of the banner. For his military valor and courage, Rubtsov was awarded the First-Class and Second-Class Order of the Patriotic War, two Orders of the Red Banner, and numerous medals.

Vladimir Rubtsov was born in 1918 in the village of Znamenka. After seven years of general education and graduation from a technical school in Tambov, he was enlisted in the army. Rubtsov studied at an artillery school, became a military technician of the second rank, and in 1940 came back home to work at the mechanical repair shop of the Kotovsk Plant No. 204 (currently known as the Tambov Gunpowder Factory).

When the Great Patriotic War started, Rubtsov volunteered for frontline duty. He became an artillery crew commander and participated in the Battle of Moscow in 1941. In the book “Kotovsk — A Hard-Working and a Fighting Town”, he wrote,

In 1945, Rubtsov took part in the Battle of Berlin.

The soldiers did not have a State Flag of the USSR with them and decided to make their own Victory Banner and raise it on the roof of the Reichstag. It was a rectangular red flag of 188 cm by 82 cm attached to a flagpole. The face of the single-layer flag had a five-pointed star, hammer and sickle painted in silver closer to the flagpole. On the remaining part of the flag, the soldiers wrote the following four lines in white letters: