the Reichstag / Kostya's Death (4:06) Yussuf's Death / The Red Banner (3:41) Stalin at Berlin Airport (4:28) Finale / Stalin's Speech / Alyosha and Natasha Reunited (2:43) [7. and 8. accompanied by a chorus singing Glory to Stalin; lyrics by Yevgeny Dolmatovsky.] Reception Contemporary response The Fall of Berlin was released a month after Stalin's birthday, on 21 January 1950 – the twenty-sixth anniversary to the death of Vladimir Lenin. In the USSR, it was watched by 38.4 million viewers, becoming the third most popular Soviet movie of 1950. Director Mikheil Chiaureli, writer Pyotr Pavlenko, cinematographer Leonid Kosmatov, composer Dmitri Shostakovich and actors Mikheil Gelovani, Boris Andreyev and Vladimir Kenigson were all awarded the Stalin Prize, 1st Class for their work. In Czechoslovakia, the film also won the Crystal Globe in the 5th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. On the day of the film's release, Literaturnaya Gazeta published a column by Aleksandr Stein in which he described the film as "wonderful... a truthful portrayal of the relations between the people and the leader... and the love of all people to Stalin." A day after, Vsevolod Pudovkin wrote in Soviet Art: "this is an outstanding work of Soviet cinema" that presented "in profound depth and in vast scale... a bold, creative representation of the subject... a lively demonstration of the ever developing genre of Socialist Realism." The picture was enthusiastically promoted by the Soviet press. A series of articles in Pravda praised it as an authentic representation of history. 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. Lieutenant Colonel Yevgeni Chernonog, a war veteran, watched The Fall of Berlin while intoxicated. He commented: "And where did this angel come from? We have not seen him there". He was arrested and condemned to eight years in the Gulag. 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. However, The Fall of Berlin was received with little enthusiasm by