A haunting collection of photographs and paintings, most from between 1905-1953, that detail the literal obliteration of Stalin's political opponents and perceived enemies of the Communist Party.

Stalin, wishing to take on the mantle (and halo) of his predecessor, Lenin, mounted a two-pronged media campaign: he had photographs and paintings doctored to make it look as though he was closer to Lenin than he actually was (Lenin grew increasingly worried about Stalin's aggressive power grabs, but was felled by a stroke before he could do more than urge his colleagues to reign Stalin in); and he decreed it a crime against the State to possess any images of people -- officials and otherwise -- who had been "eliminated." Hence we see curious posed photographs, from author David King's extensive personal collection, published years or even months apart, heavily doctored to eliminate one or many subjects. Chillingly, as time progresses, these photos become less populated -- as though the subjects never existed.

One by one, the commissars...vanish. ( )

Recently, I've seen a lot of people on social media whining about history being erased. They freak out when a statue or the Confederate flag is removed from a place of prominence. They're upset when teachers try to bring up the history of marginalized peoples that wasn't in the textbooks from which they learned history as a child, as if those books were engraved in stone or as sacred as the Bible.

Sorry, but I don't see erasure. I see an engagement with history when a society grapples with what they value and how their story has been told. If social media snowflakes want to see what erasure really means, they need to leaf through this book and watch a dictator literally having his foes -- real and imagined -- removed from the historical record with black ink and airbrushes. They need to see people so scared of their government, they pull their own books off the shelves in their own homes and start scratching out, blotting out, and cutting out words and images that might cause them to get arrested and summarily shot.

The book itself is fascinating in the best coffee table book manner, as you flip pages and watch a photograph of four men get cropped down to three men, then airbrushed to two men, and finally end up as a solitary portrait of Stalin. It's numbing to read again and again how the disappearing men were arrested and shot, arrested and shot, arrested and shot.

So there is a lot of repetition and the dry text is cursory and assumes knowledge about the Russian Revolution and the reign of Stalin and his Great Purge of the 1930s. But the pictures pretty much tell the story. ( )

A really first-rate exposition of how photographs were altered and falsified in the Stalin regime. The mixture of the originals and the altered copies (some serially altered) simply has to be seen to be believed. A must for those interested in Soviet-era history. ( )