An edition of The commissar vanishes (1997)

The commissar vanishes

the falsification of photographs and art in Stalin's Russia

1st ed.
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Last edited by IdentifierBot
July 30, 2010 | History
An edition of The commissar vanishes (1997)

The commissar vanishes

the falsification of photographs and art in Stalin's Russia

1st ed.
  • 0 Ratings
  • 6 Want to read
  • 1 Currently reading
  • 1 Have read

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.

Publish Date
Publisher
Metropolitan Books
Language
English
Pages
192

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Previews available in: English

Edition Availability
Cover of: The Commissar vanishes
Cover of: The commissar vanishes
The commissar vanishes: the falsification of photographs and art in Stalin's Russia
1997, Metropolitan Books
in English - 1st ed.
Cover of: The commissar vanishes
The commissar vanishes: the falsification of photographs and art in Stalin's Russia
1997, Metropolitan Books
in English - 1st ed.
Cover of: The commissar vanishes

Add another edition?

Book Details


Edition Notes

Includes bibliographical references (p. 190) and index.

Published in
New York

Classifications

Dewey Decimal Class
303.3/76
Library of Congress
TR85 .K55 1997

The Physical Object

Pagination
192 p. :
Number of pages
192

ID Numbers

Open Library
OL674665M
ISBN 10
0805052941
LCCN
97020832
Library Thing
8309997
Goodreads
1606154

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History

Download catalog record: RDF / JSON / OPDS | Wikipedia citation
July 30, 2010 Edited by IdentifierBot added LibraryThing ID
April 14, 2010 Edited by Open Library Bot Linked existing covers to the edition.
April 12, 2010 Edited by bgimpertBot Added goodreads ID.
December 11, 2009 Edited by WorkBot link works
April 1, 2008 Created by an anonymous user Imported from Scriblio MARC record