Editorials & Other Articles

In reality, the photograph is heavily reworked. According to the Met Museum, “retouchers smoothed Stalin’s pockmarked complexion, lengthened his shriveled left arm, and increased his stature so that Lenin seems to recede benignly… in a letter dictated around the time the picture was taken, Lenin described Stalin as intolerably rude and capricious and recommended that he be removed from his position as the Communist Party’s secretary general.”

During the 1930s the retouching went from the somewhat innocent act of blurring facial imperfections to the pernicious practice of falsifying reality.

In the later years of Stalin’s tenure, those who ran afoul of the Soviet leader were simply erased.

Millions of innocent people perished during Stalin’s “Great Purge,” including many within his inner circle. Those men were not only killed but expunged from the Soviet photographic record. Leaders like Leon Trotsky and Lev Borisovich Kamenev were airbrushed out of pictures throughout Stalin’s reign.