"Owing to the secrecy of Soviet media, the identities of the men in the photograph were often disputed, as was that of the photographer Yevgeny Khaldei."

"**Taking of the photograph on 2 May 1945

The original photo (top) was altered (bottom) by editing the watch on Ismailov's right wrist.
The Red Army gained control of the entire building on 2 May. On 2 May 1945, Khaldei scaled the now pacified Reichstag to take his picture. He was carrying with him a large flag, sewn from three tablecloths for this very purpose by his uncle. The official story would later be told that two hand-picked soldiers, the Georgian Meliton Kantaria and the Russian Mikhail Yegorov, were the first to raise the official Soviet flag known as the Victory Banner over the Reichstag, and this photograph was used as depicting the event. Some authors state that for political reasons the subjects of the photograph were changed and the actual man to hoist the flag was Aleksei Kovalev. However, according to Khaldei himself, when he arrived at the Reichstag, he simply asked the soldiers who happened to be passing by to help with the staging of the photoshoot; the one who was attaching the flag was 18-year-old Private Kovalev from Burlin, Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic and the two others were Abdulkhakim Ismailov from the Dagestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic and Leonid Gorychev (also mentioned as Aleksei Goryachev) from Minsk. The photograph was taken with a Leica III rangefinder camera with a 35mm f3.5 lens." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_a_Flag_over_the_Reichstag