The Red Flag over the Reichstag, 1945

When he saw Joe Rosenthal’s photos of flag raising on Iwo Jima, Stalin wanted a similar image to commemorate the Soviet victory over Germany. The task fell to the Ukrainian photographer Yevgeny Khaldei, who asked a family friend, Israil Solomonovich Kishitser, to make three flags for him. Kishitser’s flags, made from red tablecloths were taken by Khaldei to Berlin.

Khaldei photographed the first flag being raised at the airport, and the second one at the Brandenburg gate. The third one was supposed to be over the Reichstag. However, when he arrived there, he realized that the soldiers had already put up a flag over the building a few days earlier on April 30th. However, the flag was brought down by German snipers before any record had been made.

Khaldei’s soldiers, however, didn’t achieve fame until years later. According to the state propaganda machine, the flag raising was carried out by two other men, Meliton Kantaria, a Georgian, and Mikhail Yegorov, a Russian. Ismailov was from marginalized Dagestan, and the state wished it that the flag raisers be a Georgian and a Russian — which would have been preferred by Stalin, born in Georgia. The impostors were made Heroes of the Soviet Union by Stalin himself and were given a new “Victory” car each.

It was unclear who raised the original flag that was brought down by the snipers. According to a telegram sent to Stalin, it was by two members of a reconnaissance squad: an unnamed Kazakh and Grigory Bulatov, a 19-year-old Russian. They too had a makeshift flag — a red banner made from the cover of a mattress found in a bombed-out house — which they tied it to a statue of a horse ridden by Wilhelm I, the first German emperor.