![]() ![]() Publishers were contacted by Stalin’s minions and told to eliminate the enemy du jour from upcoming photos-and they did. According to design historian David King, who uncovered thousands of doctored photos and their original versions, the work was not performed in one location or even through an official ministry. It’s thought that Stalin’s obsession with photo doctoring constituted a mini industry in the USSR. (Credit: Tate Archive by David King, 2016/Tate, London/Art Resource, NY) Left shows the original photograph of Nikolai Antipov, Stalin, Sergei Kirov and Nikolai Shvernik in Leningrad, 1926. As each deputy fell out his favor, they were snipped out of the photo until only Stalin remained. In one photograph, Stalin is shown with a group of three of his deputies. Sometimes, official censors had to retouch photos over and over again as the list of political enemies grew longer. Stalin did the same with scores of party officials who had been photographed next to him at various events. The photo retouchers removed Yezhov from the photo and inserted new water to cover up the space where Yezhov would have been. Stalin’s censors then removed Yezhov from the photographic record, including cutting him from a photograph in which he smiled next to his former boss, Stalin, next to a waterway. He was denounced, secretly arrested, tried in a secret court, and executed. But in 1938, Yezhov fell from Stalin’s favor after being usurped by one of his own deputies. ![]() For a while Yezhov worked at Stalin’s right hand, interrogating, falsely accusing and ordering the execution of thousands of Communist Party officials. One such erasure was Nikola Yezhov, a secret police official who oversaw Stalin’s purges. Stalin used a large group of photo retouchers to cut his enemies out of supposedly documentary photographs. (Credit: Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images & AFP/GettyImages) Nikolai Yezhov, pictured right of Stalin, was later removed from this photograph at the Moscow Canal. And since Stalin knew the value of photographs in both the historical record and his use of mass media to influence the Soviet Union, they often disappeared from photos, too. Others were executed in public after show trials. Beginning in 1934 he wiped out an ever-changing group of political “enemies.” An estimated 750,000 people died during the Great Purge, as it is now known, and more than a million others were banished to remote areas to do hard labor in gulags.ĭuring the purges, many of Stalin’s enemies simply vanished from their homes. The stakes weren’t just historical: Each erasure meant a swing of Stalin’s loyalties, and most disappeared subjects also disappeared (or were killed) in real life, too.Īfter consolidating his power in 1929, Stalin declared war on Soviets he considered tainted by their connections to the political movements that had come before him. Stalin’s commitment to censorship and photo doctoring was so strong that, at the height of the Soviet Union’s international power, he rewrote history using photo alteration. Then, he disappeared from Soviet photographs, too, his existence blotted out by a retouched suit on another official from the original photo.Įnukidze’s erasure was the product of a real conspiracy to change public perception in the USSR during Joseph Stalin’s dictatorship. But during Josef Stalin’s Great Purge, the onetime member of the Communist party’s highest governing body was deemed an enemy of the state and executed by firing squad. Compare a photo taken in the 1930s of five Communist Party officials in the USSR and you’ll see Avel Enukidze, photographed next to Soviet premier Vyacheslav Molotov and others. ![]()
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