This statue is one of several in installed as part of a massive memorial honoring 5,000 of the 80,000 Soviet soldiers who died in the Battle of Berlin in April-May 1945.  The whole memorial, more of which I may show in coming posts, was designed by Soviet architect Yakov Belopolsky.  It opened four years after the end of the Second World War, on May 8, 1949, and was the main war memorial in the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany).