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The Commissar Vanishes offers a chilling look at how one man - Joseph Stalin - manipulated the science of photography to advance his own political career and to erase the memory of his victims. On Stalin's orders, purged rivals were airbrushed from group portraits, and crowd scenes were altered to depict even greater legions of the faithful. In one famous image, several Party members disappeared from an official photograph, to be replaced by a sylvan glade.
For the past three decades, author and photohistorian David King has assembled the world's largest archive of photographs, posters, and paintings from the Soviet era. His collection has grown to more than a quarter of a million images, the best of which have been selected for The Commissar Vanishes.
The efforts of the Kremlin airbrushers were often unintentionally hilarious. A 1919 photograph showing a large crowd of Bolsheviks clustered around Lenin, for example, became, with the aid of the retoucher, an intimate portrait of Lenin and Stalin sitting alone, and then, in a later version, of Stalin by himself.
The Commissar Vanishes is nothing less than the history of the Soviet Union, as retold through falsified images, many of them published here for the first time outside Russia. In each case, the juxtaposition of the original and the doctored images yields a terrifying - and often tragically funny - insight into one of the darkest chapters of modern history.
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Previews available in: English
Edition | Availability |
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1
The commissar vanishes: the falsification of photographs and art in Stalin's Russia
1997, Metropolitan Books
in English
- 1st ed.
0805052941 9780805052947
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Libraries near you:
WorldCat
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2
The commissar vanishes: the falsification of photographs and art in Stalin's Russia : photographs from the David King Collection
1997, Metropolitan Books
in English
0805052941 9780805052947
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cccc
Libraries near you:
WorldCat
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3
The commissar vanishes: the falsification of photographs and art in Stalin's Russia
1997, Metropolitan Books
in English
- 1st ed.
0805052941 9780805052947
|
zzzz
Libraries near you:
WorldCat
|
4
The Commissar vanishes: the falsification of photographs and art in Stalin's Russia
1997, Canongate
in English
0862417244 9780862417246
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zzzz
Libraries near you:
WorldCat
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Book Details
Edition Notes
151,231
Includes bibliographical references (p. 190) and index.
The Physical Object
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- Created May 29, 2009
- 7 revisions
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August 19, 2010 | Edited by IdentifierBot | added LibraryThing ID |
April 16, 2010 | Edited by bgimpertBot | Added goodreads ID. |
December 15, 2009 | Edited by WorkBot | link works |
September 5, 2009 | Edited by EdwardBot | fix bad author link |
May 29, 2009 | Created by ImportBot | Imported from Collingswood Public Library record |