Photoshop circa Stalinist Era

An incredible article about the altering of photos during the Stalinist era where uncountable amount of people "disappeared" and history was rewritten daily. Falsehoods became the truth and wavering from the "truth" was inadvisable.

Two Soviet types of people were removed from the visual record. The first group, people like Kamenev and Trotsky, had their revolutionary pasts destroyed (and were, of course, murdered) but continued in Soviet history in new roles as terrorist agents of Hitler. They were thus ungoodpersons rather than unpersons proper, reemerging in the pictorial record only in political cartoons (one of which King has reprinted in which Nikolai Bukharin, Trotsky, and others figure as mad dogs on Nazi leashes).

The second category, which also figures in King's book, includes those who simply disappeared after 1930 and were not heard of again for decades: Kossior, Rudzutak, Eikhe, Chubar, Postyshev, Yezhov--all members or candidates of Stalin's own Politburo. One of the most extraordinary things about Western admirers of the Soviet system, those who were also supposedly informed students of the Soviet scene, is that they somehow did not notice this phenomenon. It is as if--exactly as if--British Americanists had simply failed to register the disappearance of half the U.S. cabinet and most of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff.

I'm not sure how I found this but I really want to read the book The Commissar Vanishes.