The Commissar Vanishes

This volume looks at how Joseph Stalin manipulated the science of photography to further his own political career and to erase the memory of his victims. Over the past 30 years, author and photo-historian David King has assembled the world's largest archive of doctored photographs from the Soviet era, the best of which have been selected for this book. A 1919 photograph of a large crowd of Bolsheviks clustered around Lenin becomes, with the aid of an airbrush, an intimate portrait of Lenin and Stalin sitting alone, and then, in its final version, Stalin by himself. In another, a victim of the purges is replaced by a ghostly Corinthian pillar. In a third, Trostsky is removed from Lenin's side on the occasion of one of the early Bolshevik rallies as was his photograph from almost every book in every library in Russia. According to officialdom Trostsky simply didn't exist. In each case, the juxtaposition of the original and the doctored image yields a terrifying - and often tragically funny - insight into a dark period of history. The end result is an illuminating record which reveals how easily history can be distorted.