The Fall of Berlin (Russian: Падение Берлина, romanized: Padeniye Berlina) is a 1950 Soviet war and propaganda film, in two parts separated in the manner of a serial.

[1] It was produced by Mosfilm Studio and directed by Mikheil Chiaureli, with a script written by Pyotr Pavlenko and a musical score composed by Dmitri Shostakovich.

Aleksei Ivanov, a shy steel factory worker, greatly surpasses his production quota and is chosen to receive the Order of Lenin and to have a personal interview with Joseph Stalin.

At Berlin, after receiving the blessings of his allies – Spain, Turkey, the Vatican, Romania and Japan – and watching a long column of Soviet slaves-laborers, Natasha among them, Adolf Hitler is furious to hear that Moscow has not fallen.

The Germans plan to execute the inmates of the concentration camp in which Natasha is held before the arrival of the Red Army, but Aleksei's unit liberates the prisoners before they carry through their design.

Stalin's cult of personality, which began to manifest itself already in the late 1930s, was marginalized during World War II; to mobilize the population against the enemy, Soviet films focused on historical heroes who defended Russia or on the feats of the people themselves.

The Soviet Minister of Cinema, Ivan Bolshakov, instructed them both to begin work on The Fall of Berlin shortly after the release of The Vow in July 1946.

[5] The dictator intervened in Pavlenko's writing, read the screenplay's manuscript and corrected several grammatical mistakes; he also deleted a short sequence during which a German civilian in Berlin exhorted his family to hasten and flee as the Red Army approaches.

[9] Edvard Radzinsky claimed his father heard from Pavlenko that Beria told him The Vow was to be a "sublime film", intended to identify Stalin with Jesus: Lenin, paralleling John the Baptist, recognized him as the Messiah; "this seminarist's language betrayed the authorship of this observation".

[11] Author John Riley claimed the scene in which Stalin's plane arrives in Berlin – which was fictional; Stalin never flew to the German capital, let alone on the day of the capture of the Reichstag[12] – was modeled after Hitler's landing in Nuremberg from the Triumph of the Will, and that the film's ending was inspired by a similar sequence from Kolberg; the storming of the Reichstag "parodied" the massacre on the Odessa Steps from Battleship Potemkin, a gesture intended to mock Sergei Eisenstein.

[13] According to the memories of Svetlana Aliluyeva, Chiaureli approached her father with the idea to combine the fate of his son, Yakov Dzhugashvili, in the plot.

[14] Soviet actor Artyom Karapetian claimed Chiaureli's wife, actress Veriko Anjaparidze, told him Stalin was so outraged when he heard of this that Lavrentiy Beria – who was standing nearby – reached into his trousers' pocket, "presumably, for his gun.

"[15] The director's daughter, Sofiko Chiaureli, recounted that her father "knew he was saved" when Stalin wiped tears from his eyes as he watched Gelovani descend from the plane and muttered "If only I had gone to Berlin.

[17] In addition, a scale model of Berlin, over one square kilometer in size,[18] was built in Mosfilm's studios; this miniature was to create the urban combat scenes in the end of Part II.

According to Riley, it is unclear whether Chiaureli intended to mock the Nazis by portraying them as unable to recognize an item they have forbidden, or he has simply been ignorant of the ban.

[2] Public reaction to the film was monitored by the government: in a memorandum to Mikhail Suslov from 11 March 1950, two officials from the Bolshevik All-Union Communist Party's Propaganda Department reported that the newspaper Art and Life received numerous letters from viewers, who – although generally approving of the film – criticized various aspects of the plot; many of them cited Ivanov's boyish conduct as unworthy of a Stakhanovite.

[24] The East German political establishment excessively promoted the picture, as well; it was officially classified as a documentary, and all servicemen of the Barracked People's Police were obliged to watch it.

Some aesthetics today advocate American film noirs, but in the future only specialists will be interested in these museums of horror, the remains of a dead epoch...

[26] When the picture was imported to the UK by the Society for Cultural Relations with the USSR in 1952, the British Board of Film Censors considered banning it, especially as it was attacking Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

Churchill wrote to historian Hugh Trevor-Roper in May, asking about the veracity of the Berlin underground flooding by Hitler, and the latter replied it was "mythologizing" history.

After the Foreign Office concluded the picture was "too one-sided to serve as an effective communist propaganda", it was released without cuts, with a long disclaimer that stressed "the advantages of living in the free British society" and that the Soviet screenwriters completely ignored the Western Allies' role in the war.

Tony Shaw noted The Fall of Berlin enjoyed mostly positive reviews during its six-week run in London and its subsequent showings in the country, though some also commented it was overblown propaganda; the critics of The Sunday Times and the Evening Standard both opined that the Soviets' obliteration of the UK-US contribution to victory was akin to the same treatment received by the Red Army in Western productions about the war.

[27] The film was one of the few foreign-language pictures to be presented in the BBC's program Current Release; former war correspondent Matthew Halton was invited to comment on it.

The US magazine Variety described it as "The Russian answer to the many US and UK films about the war... having some contemporary significance, in the light of the tensions between the West and the Soviet Union.

"[28] The New York Times' critic dubbed it as a "deafening blend of historical pageantry and wishful thinking... directed as if his (Chiaureli's) life depended upon it" and – in what author David Caute claimed was the worst condemnation which could be leveled at it in the day[14] – that it had a "Hollywood-style plot".

He also disapproved of the historical veracity of the Yalta Conference scene,[29] while John Howard Lawson, recently released from prison, praised it as an authentic depiction of events.

[14] Officials in Artkino, the picture's US distributor, claimed the film was "already witnessed by 1.2 million people" in the United States by 9 June 1952, a day after its release there.

[8] During the summer of 1953, the scene featuring Aleksei Ivanov dining with Stalin and the other Soviet leaders in Moscow was edited out from all available copies; author Richard Taylor attributed this to the appearance Beria's character had there.

On 25 February 1956, Nikita Khrushchev delivered a speech condemning Stalin's cult of personality in front of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

[5] Katerina Clark discerned that Stalin, beside his function as a great captain, was made the enabler of romantic relationship: before meeting him, Aleksei was incapable of expressing his love to Natasha.