El Estalinismo

Falsification of history

The Soviet Union

The most common examples of photograph alteration and falsification come from communist Russia. Unwanted persons, so-called "enemies of the people" were not only killed, but also removed from photographs where their presence was unwanted. Photographs were altered with the intent of changing the past.
Leon Trotsky was a close friend of Lenin, and shared his idealistic ideas about the communist state. In the following photographs he can be seen together with Lenin.
   The next set of images are nearly identical, however Trotsky is removed from both photographs.

   The historical reason for this alteration is that Stalin eventually began to see Trotsky as a threat and labeled him an "enemy of the people". After he was deported from the Soviet Union in 1929, Trotsky critisized Stalin's leadership, arguing that the dictatorship Stalin exercised was based on his own interests, rather than those of the people. This contributed substantially to Trotsky's removal from photographs and history.

Nikolai Yezhov, chief of the Soviet secret police, suffered a fate similar to that of Trotsky. For some time he was close to Stalin, staging the infamous Moscow frame-trials, where innocent people were forced to confess crimes against Stalin and the Soviet Union, and were consequently executed. In the photograph below, he can be seen walking together with Stalin.

In the modified photograph below, it is as though he had never existed


[ all pictures above were taken from The Commissar Vanishes ]
In 1998, Hoover Digest, a publication at Stanford University published an article entitled Inside Stalin's Darkroom. This is just another example of how history was altered by the Soviet Union.

The above examples illustrate how alteration of images can change history. Unwanted persons are removed from photographs and are thus also removed from history. Their connections to other historical persons(in this case Lenin and Stalin) are literally erased. Fortunately we have access to the original photographs, but who is to say that what we deem to be originals really are authentic? After all, if we had not known about the original photographs, we would have naturally assumed that the falsifications were authentic.