The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin's Russia (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com 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.

From Kirkus Reviews

The doctoring of photographs didn't begin with the advent of computers in magazine production departments. ``So much falsification took place during the Stalin years that it is possible to tell the story of the Soviet era through retouched photographs,'' writes King. For Joseph Stalin, photo retouching was a technique for controlling public perception and memory. People who vanished in real life--whether banished to the farthest reaches of the Soviet Union or eliminated by the secret police--vanished as well from photos, and even paintings. In many cases they were airbrushed out completely, in others their faces were clumsily blacked out with ink. This creepy visual rewriting of history is documented here by King, who has been collecting such revised images since 1970, when he found Leon Trotsky completely expunged from official Soviet archives. Placing original photos alongside the altered ones, King also explains in lengthy captions who has vanished and why. A disturbing testament to the destruction wrought when a megalomaniac becomes a dictator. (History Book Club selection) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: Metropolitan Books; 1 edition (October 15, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805052941
• ISBN-13: 978-0805052947
• Product Dimensions: 11.6 x 10.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #723,595 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Filling in the blanks, August 10, 2000

By	The Sanity Inspector (USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

"We can always find another widow for Lenin." So threatened Stalin to Lenin's real widow Krupskaya, whom he hated. So absolute was the Communist Party's hold on all aspects of public life in Russia in Stalin's reign, that famous people, who had been praised to the skies just the week before, could be utterly effaced from the public's mind through sheer terror. Once someone fell from favor with the dictator, his name and picture were erased from the public record--even books critical of the person could be proscribed--and to even mention his name might mean prison or worse. This book is the author's attempt to trace the trail of falsification through Stalin-era photos and artworks.

It is a testament to the censor's thoroughness that the trail is quite incomplete. In many cases, the author hasn't been able to find even the name of the extirpated individual in the before-and-after photos. Some of the examples given here were taken from the folio albums of the Soviet photographer Rodchenko. After the bureaucrats he had photographed were arrested and shot, he went to work inking and scissoring out his own work, the images of the new non-persons.

The heroic photomontages, with the jut-jawed Bolsheviks vanguarding the masses, are appalling when you think of how many would later be arrested, tortured into accusing themselves of the most heinous, yet baseless, crimes, and then shot. The damned were airbrushed out of the picture, replaced with a stripped-in comrade, or a painted-in pillar or staircase, sometimes leaving a shoe or elbow that the retoucher missed. The Western mind shudders at the slavish worship that Stalin had at his command, to cause such colossal lies to be perpetuated. Read this big, lavishly illustrated book, and get the real picture.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A rare gem, June 10, 2002

By	John Coyle (New Jersey) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

A true gem of a book, dealing with a subject that is much overlooked. As the inspiration for Orwell's 1984 revising history, it is a chilling look at early Soviet attempts to rewrite history by erasing people from photos. Watching a photo of 5 men dwindle down to a picture of one as the others are disgraced, imprisoned, killed and then erased is just mindblowing!

Whether you are a fan of Soviet history (i'm not) or not, the cold war touched us all and this book documents it in the entirety

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating Study of History & Photography, April 23, 1998

By	Robert Derenthal "bucherwurm" (California United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

As a serious photographer I purchased this book because of an interest in photographic manipulation. After reading a few pages, however, I was caught up in the history of the Russian revolution, and Stalin's attempt to manipulate that history. The book is so interesting that I wasn't the least disappointed that the techniques used in altering the pictures weren't discussed. Suffice it to say in that regard that Stalin's photographic retouchers were quite primitive.