"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.