https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/stalin-photo-manipulation-1922-1953/
Stalin didn’t have Photoshop, but that didn’t keep him from wiping the traces of his enemies from the history books. Using tools that now seem impossibly primitive, Soviet proto-Photoshoppers made “once-famous personalities vanish” and crafted photographs representing Stalin “as the only true friend, comrade, and successor to Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik Revolution and founder of the USSR.”
One day a politician may have been in favor, the next he could be facing the firing squad as an enemy of the people. In the Soviet Union, people were literally written out of the history books by using photo manipulation techniques.
After he came to power in 1929, Stalin declared war on the Soviets he considered tainted by their connections to the political movements that had come before him.
Beginning in 1934 he wiped out an ever-changing group of political “enemies.” Some 750,000 people died during the Great Purge, as it is now known, and more than a million others were banished to remote areas to do hard labor in gulags.
During the purges, many of Stalin’s enemies simply vanished from their homes. Others were executed in public after show trials. And since Stalin knew the value of photographs in both the historical record and his use of mass media to influence the Soviet Union, they often disappeared from photos, too.
This quasi-artisanal work, one of the more enjoyable tasks for the art department of publishing houses during those times, demanded serious dexterity with the scalpel, glue, paint, and airbrush. In this manner, Stalin could order written out of history such comrades he ultimately deemed disloyal (and who usually wound up executed as).
(please go to link to see manipulated photographs - where people are "disappeared" )
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