Matvey Blanter

At the time, he wrote light dance and jazz music, including "John Gray" (1923), a foxtrot that became a major hit.

Other notable Blanter songs from that period include "Youth" (1937), a cheerful marching song asserting that "right now, everyone is young in our young, beautiful country"; "Stalin Is Our Battle-Glory" (1937), a widely performed hymn to Joseph Stalin; and "The Football March" (1938), music from which is still performed at the start of every football match in Russia.

Standing on a high riverbank, a young woman, Katyusha, sings of her beloved (compared to "a gray eagle of the steppes"), who is far away serving on the Soviet border.

But Blanter was also meeting with Chuikov at the time the delegation arrived and he could not pass as a Red Army officer as he was wearing civilian clothes.

While he remained there for most of the conference, he eventually lapsed into unconsciousness from a lack of air, collapsing out of the closet and into the room just as the delegates were preparing to leave, embarrassing Chuikov and astonishing the Germans.

In the 1966 novel The Last Battle,[6] Cornelius Ryan records that Blanter accompanied the Red Army into Berlin during the last days of the war and the collapse of Nazi power.

In the film, he is stuffed into the closet of Vasily Chuikov's office, who is in a rush to meet the Nazi general, Hans Krebs.