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Before Photoshop, Soviets Mastered Erasing People from Photographs and History

Adobe Photoshop, the world's best-known piece of image-editing software, has long since transitioned from noun to verb: 'to Photoshop' has come to mean something like 'to alter a photograph, often with intent to mislead or deceive.' But in that usage, Photoshopping didn't begin with Photoshop, and indeed the early masters of Photoshopping did it well before anyone had even dreamed of the personal computer, let alone a means to manipulate images on one.

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.” In this man­ner, Stal­in could order writ­ten out of his­to­ry such com­rades he ulti­mate­ly deemed dis­loy­al (and who usu­al­ly wound up exe­cut­ed as) as Naval Com­mis­sar Niko­lai Yezhov, infa­mous­ly made to dis­ap­pear from Stal­in’s side on a pho­to tak­en along­side the Moscow Canal, or Peo­ple’s Com­mis­sar for Posts and Telegraphs Niko­lai Antipov, com­man­der of the Leningrad par­ty Sergei Kirov, and Chair­man of the Pre­sid­i­um of the Supreme Sovi­et Niko­lai Shvernik — pic­tured, and removed one by one, just above. Cos­mo­nauts tem­porar­i­ly erased from his­to­ry include Valentin Bon­darenko, who died in a fire dur­ing a train­ing exer­cise, and the espe­cial­ly promis­ing Grig­oriy Nelyubov (pic­tured, and then not pic­tured, at the top of the post), who “had been expelled from the pro­gram for mis­be­hav­ior and lat­er killed him­self.” Yuri Gagarin, the cos­mo­naut who made his­to­ry as the first human in out­er space, did not, of course, get erased by the proud author­i­ties, but even his pho­tos, like the one just above where he shakes hands with the Sovi­et space pro­gram’s top-secret leader Sergey Koroly­ov, went under the knife for cos­met­ic rea­sons, here the removal of the evi­dent­ly dis­tract­ing work­man in the back­ground — hard­ly a major his­tor­i­cal fig­ure, let alone a con­tro­ver­sial one, but still a real and maybe even liv­ing reminder that while the cam­era may lie, it can’t hold its tongue for­ev­er.

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