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Rating: On May 2, 1945, around seven in the morning, three riflemen from the 756th Regiment of the Red Army, Mikhail Egorov, Abdulhakim Ismailov, and Meliton Kantarijan, climb the Reichstag. Chaldej, besides a Zorkij camera, has a red tablecloth, a star, and the symbol of communism previously cut out of cardboard, needle, and thread. He sews the cutout with some difficulty, attaches it all to a makeshift pole, and also calls two other soldiers, Aleksej Kovalev and Leonid Gorijacev, asking for help in exchange for glory on celluloid. Ismailov is helped to climb the remains of a pillar and fixes the Soviet flag next to the famous glass dome. Chaldej holds his weapon and takes 36 photos from different angles, with the wind in favor, and with different protagonists. Reichstag conquered, Nazism crushed, Hitler defeated, Great Patriotic War won.
The story of this famous image is rather troubled and it is absolutely fair to state that the heroic riflemen were not the first to raise a red flag on the roof of the Reichstag. The Red Army had already invaded Berlin, and Hitler was firing his last shots, sending the last units of the Wehrmacht to slaughter. Not content, he orders Goebbels to fire blanks too, using the Volkssturm, which were formations of able people including many teenagers and elderly, just to attempt to counter the far too superior Soviet advance. On April 30, after the last bloody battle, Vladimir Makov, Rakhimzhan Koshkarbaev, Anna Vladimirova, and Georgij Bulatov, despite the palace still being guarded by weak German resistants, climbed with any red drape, intended to guarantee the "prise de la Bastille." For Stalinist propaganda, the important thing was to see some waving body resembling the Soviet drape at the highest point of the Nazi parliamentary palace. Red rags or flags brought for the occasion were applied as best they could to the arms of ornamental statues. However, the first to tread the ruins of the Reichstag was Sergeant Mikhail Minin, who fixed one to a crown held by another statue on the night of April 30, 1945, precisely at 22:40, but the leaden darkness would not have allowed even the diligent Chaldej to capture the moment. The next morning something highlighted the presence of some Germans hidden in the building. The flag had disappeared. After extinguishing the last outbreaks, at dawn on May 2, 1945, in a terrifying silence broken by some most probable shout of joy and the metallic squawk of tanks, the Soviet soldiers successfully reached the summit of the Nazi mountain, delivering the coup de grace to Hitler's dying monster.
Subsequently, manipulations and anecdotes surfaced. The reporter confessed, since Stalin's death, to the staging. Besides the date, brought forward by two days to make the undertaking more daring, the alteration of the smoke in the background was applied to make it sootier for a more dramatic atmosphere. Moreover, a watch was meticulously retouched with a needle to remove a watch from the right wrist of the soldier supporting Ismailov, likely a result of looting. The propaganda couldn't highlight the vengeful looting of the soldiers on German soil, nor could it acknowledge that the first to raise the flag was at least a Georgian soldier, thus a compatriot of the fierce dictator, almost to the detriment of the true protagonists.
As for me, the photo signifies the death of Nazism, beyond what happened afterward and the horrors that any war entails. The second, globally, saw many and counted double. We know war all too well, and after suffering an attack, an invasion, the destruction of everything, and the assassination of every man (the Nazis killed Chaldej’s father and four sisters), one acts with "do unto others as has been done unto you, which is no sin." And in these cases, nothing and no one can be justified.
But for a true communist, there is nothing more beautiful than seeing, amidst wind and gunpowder, that red flag flying on the pole of the just-conquered Reichstag.
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