The Fall of Berlin — А Film by Mikhail Chiaureli with Music by Dmitriy Shostakovich: An Essay on the History of One Artifact of the Stalin Era

The article is dedicated to one of the most important works of Soviet Stalinist cinema, the 1949 film The Fall of Berlin, and to Dmitriy Shostakovich’s role in its creation. Based on a body of archival sources, the chronicle of the origin of the film’s musical score is reconstructed. An attempt is made to assess the significance of this work for the composer’s oeuvre and the Soviet art in general. For the first time, the musical holographs of the full score and sketches for the The Fall of Berlin are analyzed, and previously unknown information is provided about Joseph Stalin’s part in editing the film’s script. Corrections are made to the dating of Anna Akhmatova’s poem dedicated to the film and its music.