The commissar vanishes
Subtitle: the falsification of photographs and art in Stalin's Russia :  photographs from the David King Collection
By: David King ; preface by Stephen F. Cohen.
Publisher: Metropolitan Books
Published: 1997
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 192
Subjects: Photography -- Soviet Union -- History -- 20th century.; Photographs -- Censorship -- Soviet Union.; Photographs -- Political aspects -- Soviet Union.; Photographs -- Forgeries -- Soviet Union.; Photography -- Retouching -- Soviet Union.
Description: The Commissar Vanishes offers a chilling look at how one man - Joseph Stalin - manipulated the science of photography to advance his own political career and to erase the memory of his victims. On Stalin's orders, purged rivals were airbrushed from group portraits, and crowd scenes were altered to depict even greater legions of the faithful. In one famous image, several Party members disappeared from an official photograph, to be replaced by a sylvan glade.

For the past three decades, author and photohistorian David King has assembled the world's largest archive of photographs, posters, and paintings from the Soviet era. His collection has grown to more than a quarter of a million images, the best of which have been selected for The Commissar Vanishes.

The efforts of the Kremlin airbrushers were often unintentionally hilarious. A 1919 photograph showing a large crowd of Bolsheviks clustered around Lenin, for example, became, with the aid of the retoucher, an intimate portrait of Lenin and Stalin sitting alone, and then, in a later version, of Stalin by himself.

The Commissar Vanishes is nothing less than the history of the Soviet Union, as retold through falsified images, many of them published here for the first time outside Russia. In each case, the juxtaposition of the original and the doctored images yields a terrifying - and often tragically funny - insight into one of the darkest chapters of modern history.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 190) and index.