The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia New Edition - Softcover

King, David

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9781849762519: The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia New Edition

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1849762511 ISBN 13: 9781849762519

Publisher: Tate, 2014

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King looks at how Stalin manipulated the science of photography to further his own political career and to erase the memory of his victims. In each case, the juxtaposition of original and doctored images reveals how easily history can be distorted.

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Review

In Stalinist Russia, it was commonplace for Soviet history to be rewritten with inconvenient participants removed--often men or women who had aided the Communist Revolution in the early days and then had somehow fallen afoul of Stalin himself. In The Commissar Vanishes, English art historian David King assembles an impressive body of photographs and artwork that shows the process whereby a hero could overnight be made into villain. "The physical eradication of Stalin's political opponents at the hands of the secret police was swiftly followed by their obliteration from all forms of pictorial existence," King rightly notes: in one noteworthy sequence reproduced on the cover, a photograph of Stalin with three revolutionary leaders is airbrushed and cropped and clipped until, one by one, those leaders disappear and only Stalin is left--conveying the message that Stalin carried the Russian Revolution by himself. Another photograph from the 1920s depicts a meeting of dozens of trade-union and Bolshevik leaders; by the late 1930s, all but a handful of them had been murdered at Stalin's orders. King's work restores some of these men and women to history and illustrates the essential inhumanity of totalitarian thought.

About the Author

During the past three decades, author and photo-historian David King has assembled the world’s largest archive of doctored photographs, posters, and painting from the Soviet era. King began his collection during a trip to Russia in 1970, when he discovered that thousands of images of Stalin’s victims had been lost to posterity—either by design or neglect. His collection has grown to more than a quarter million images, the best of which have been selected for The Commissar Vanishes.

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