Ogoniok prints the flag photo; the smoke was added, the watch erased, the cloth was a Moscow tablecloth

Eight days after the fall of Berlin, the magazine Ogoniok published Yevgeny Khaldei's photograph of a Soviet soldier raising a flag over the ruined Reichstag — an image that had been staged, edited, and partly invented, but that became one of the defining pictures of the Second World War. Khaldei had carried the flag to Berlin himself, sewn from a red tablecloth by a friend in Moscow. By the time readers saw it on May 13, 1945, a looted watch had been needled out of the negative and smoke had been added from a separate frame…