The Wall – Live in Berlin council meeting, and felt they needed some kind of an event to focus attention on it… So I agreed to have a meeting with Leonard Cheshire. And I was very impressed, and said I would do what I could, although I thought it was very unlikely that it would come off… Then, in November [1989], when the wall started coming down, we started negotiating." The show had a sell-out crowd of over 350,000 people. Right before the performance started the gates were opened which enabled at least another 100,000 people to watch. While this broke records for a paid-entry concert,
The Fall of Berlin (film) released from prison, praised it as an authentic depiction of events. Officials in Artkino, the picture's American distributor, claimed the film was "already witnessed by 1.2 million people" in the United States by 9 June 1952, a day after its release there. Stalin's death in March 1953 signaled a sharp turn in the politics of the Eastern Bloc. After Beria was arrested, Chiaureli was instructed by the new rulers to leave Moscow. "The Fall of Berlin" was withdrawn from circulation. A directive of the Soviet Film Export Bureau to halt its screening reached East Germany in July. During the summer