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The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin's Russia | 
 enlarge | Author: David King
Publisher: Metropolitan Books
Category: Book
Buy Used: $75.00
Used (9) from $75.00
Rating:  15 reviews
Sales Rank: 775441
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 192
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.7
Dimensions (in): 11.8 x 10.1 x 0.8
ISBN: 0805052941
Dewey Decimal Number: 303.376
EAN: 9780805052947
ASIN: 0805052941
Publication Date: October 15, 1997
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Colour photos and art throughout. 189 pp.
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Amazon.com
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.
Product Description
A New York Times Notable Book, 1997
The lavishly illustrated and often darkly hilarious retelling of Soviet history through the doctored photographs under Stalin.
The Commissar Vanishes has been hailed as a brilliant, indispensable record of an era. The Commissar Vanishes offers a unique and chilling look at how one man--Joseph Stalin--manipulated the science of photography to advance his own political career and erase the memory of his victims. Over the past thirty years David King has assembled the world's largest archive of doctored Soviet photographs, the best of which appear here, in a book Tatyana Tolstaya, in The New York Review of Books, called "an extraordinary, incomparable volume."
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| Customer Reviews: Read 10 more reviews...
Soviet pictures don't always tell the truth November 16, 2007
James D. Crabtree (Fayetteville, NC USA)
This book beautifully illustrates the thought-control practiced by the Communists in the Stalin era. Although everyone who has studied Soviet history as come across references to people being "cut out" of photos or history being rewritten this book actually SHOWS the reader the process and, more important, the stories behind many of these edits.
Soviet books I had access to in the 1980s always seem to have grainy photographs... whether by design or by accident these types of photos were easier to doctor. People who were no longer in favor or whose presence in a photo put a lie to the politically-correct version of history then in vogue were taken out, sometimes in a way that made the change undetectable and in other cases quite crudely. Another shocking aspect of thought-control was that in many cases it was done by citizens themselves, inking out printed images of those known to be out of favor with the Party or cutting pictures from books because they contained "unpeople." This practice is what gave Orwell some of the ideas he used in 1984.
I shudder to think what Photoshop would have done for the Communist Party. It might have forestalled the Fall of the Wall for ten years!
First rate July 11, 2005
RaDadIndy (Indianapolis, IN USA)
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
Splendid blending of text and photographs. I gave this book to my teenage son as he was reading "1984" for a school assignment. He was impressed with the book on its own merits. The pictures draw you in, and I think this is especially true for teens. I could also see that it helped my son understand that Orwell's fiction was everyday life for the people of the Soviet Union.
Fabulous September 27, 2003
Jeremy D. Weinstein (Walnut Creek, CA USA)
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
A terrific historical document. Graphically captures the paranoia and retroactive history making that was Stalinism.
A rare gem June 11, 2002
John Coyle (New Jersey)
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
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
WOW. April 5, 2002
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
I saw this book just today, in History class. Like another reviewer, i had previously read 1984, and thought it was great, but a little far fetched. would they *really* go to all those lengths to distort history? Well, "The Commissar Vanishes" answered my question. I don't think i've ever seen something so... wow.
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