Nikolai Yezhov was never photographed beside Stalin
| Nikolai Yezhov was never photographed beside Stalin | |
|---|---|
| MANIPULATED MEDIA | |
| "Official Soviet photographs showed Joseph Stalin walking along the Moscow–Volga Canal without Nikolai Yezhov, the former secret police chief." | |
| Domain | History |
| Tactic | Manipulation Propaganda Technique |
| Era | Historical |
| First seen | 1940 |
| Origin | Soviet state censors, who retouched photographs after Yezhov's arrest and execution |
| Last reviewed | 2026-10-30 |
| Further reading: books on History | |
Nikolai Yezhov ran the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, during the Great Terror of 1937–38, when hundreds of thousands of people were executed. He was photographed walking beside Joseph Stalin on the bank of the Moscow–Volga Canal. In 1939 he was arrested, and in 1940 he was shot.
After his fall, the photo was altered and he disappeared from it, leaving Stalin standing alone by the water.
What the evidence shows
- Before and after. The original and retouched versions were collected by British designer and historian David King, who published them in The Commissar Vanishes in 1997.
- A wider practice. Soviet censors removed purged officials from photographs, paintings and books on a large scale, including Leon Trotsky from images of Lenin's speeches.
- Erasing memory. Citizens were sometimes expected to cut or ink out the faces of purged figures in their own books and photographs.
Why it matters
State photo doctoring was gaslighting at the scale of a nation: it asked people to doubt what they had seen and to accept a revised past.
Gaslighting Erasing a purged official from photographs asked Soviet citizens to doubt what they had seen: gaslighting through images. The word comes from Patrick Hamilton's 1938 play Gas Light and the 1944 film Gaslight, in which a husband dims the gas lamps and insists his wife is imagining it. Where the word comes from · More gaslighting cases
Sources
- David King, The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin's Russia, Metropolitan Books, 1997.
- Tate, "The Commissar Vanishes," David King Collection.
- Newseum, The Commissar Vanishes exhibit materials.