Stalin's death. Development As with all films in which his character made an appearance, Stalin took a keen interest in the work on The Fall of Berlin. 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. German historian Lars Karl believed this signaled his resolution to demonstrate that the civilian populace had nothing to fear from the Soviets. The picture was the first feature film about the Battle of Berlin and the events in Hitler's bunker, preceding Der letzte Akt by five years. 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". Radzinsky added The Fall of Berlin "further developed the theme", as it ends "with an apotheosis: Stalin arrives by plane... In the white attire of an angel descending from the clouds", he "reveals himself to the expectant humans... They glorify the Messiah in all tongues." Russian historian Alexander Prokhorov believed the film was influenced by Nazi propaganda films. 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 – 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. 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. Stalin promptly rejected this. 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." 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