Photograph/Unknown Image Source: Wikimedia Commons
This article was originally published in October 2015.
Joseph Stalin is credited with having carried out systematic campaigns of suppression and terror against individuals that had fallen out of his favour. The persecution of dissenters and rivals began with Lenin’s death in 1924. Historians’ estimates of the number of citizens and party members sent to their deaths under his regime vary between 6,80,000 and 1.2 million. This particular photograph brings out a rather bizarre side of Stalin’s brutal oppression. It was shot in 1925 during the 14th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party of the Soviet Union in Moscow. The original and its heavily doctored version are among the many images recovered by a British art collector, David King, years after the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the declassification of its archives.
Scalpels, lithography masks, ink and charcoal had been used to airbrush and crop five members out of the picture after their subsequent expulsion from the party. Of the nine photographed, three were executed, one committed suicide, and three died under mysterious circumstances. Only Kliment Voroshilov (fifth from left) outlived Stalin.
The portrait in the background is closer to Stalin than in the original. The doctored version would later be used in two of his official biographies. Photograph/Unknown Image Source: Wikimedia Commons
The practice of doctoring photographs remained prevalent throughout Stalin’s regime, and after. Several party members, including Stalin himself, would disappear and reappear within party propaganda on the orders of his successors, Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev. He had advocated that art should serve as a medium to reflect the ideals and aspirations of the communist revolution. This style of art, termed socialist realism, was prominent in Soviet-era films and photography. The irony is that much of it was artificial, and resulted in the distortion of history.