A
portrait of Djakhan Abidova, a woman in the Communist Party of
Uzbekistan, deliberately damaged as part of an effort to erase her in
the nineteen-thirties.
Photograph by Samuel Cole / Tate
How unreal can things get? As the sense of shared reality is eroded, more with each passing day, one wonders. Writing on the relationship between truth and politics
in this magazine, fifty-one years ago, Hannah Arendt noted just how
vulnerable factual truth is, using the example of “the role during the
Russian Revolution of a man by the name of Trotsky, who appears in none
of the Soviet Russian history books.” Thirty years after Arendt
published her article, a British collector and historian of Russia,
David King, published a study in the form of a photo album—a study of
the disappearance of the physical record of Trotsky and a number of
other Russians who fell out of favor, and out of history, during the
Stalin era.
The book is called “The Commissar Vanishes.”
The title is, incongruously, literal. Its specific reference is to a
photograph, from 1919, of a second-anniversary celebration of the
October Revolution. In the picture, Vladimir Lenin stands at the top of a
set of stairs, surrounded by many unidentified men and children and a
few recognizable men, including Leon Trotsky, stationed just in front of
Lenin. By the time the photograph was published, in 1967, Trotsky had
disappeared: he had been airbrushed out, along with several other
commissars.
Vladimir
Lenin and Leon Trotsky in Red Square during the second-anniversary
celebration of the Russian Revolution, on November 7, 1919. Photograph by Leo Ya Leonidov / Tate
Leon Trotsky and Lev Borisovich Kamenev have been airbrushed out. Photograph by Leo Ya Leonidov / Tate
Sometimes
it is impossible to tell just who is missing from a photograph—only
that someone is. One photograph in King’s collection shows a propaganda
train—a train that crisscrossed the country spreading the message of the
revolution. “When we look closely at the window on the right of the
photograph,” King writes, “a ghostly apparition—the result of the
retoucher’s inept hand—is all that remains of the person who had been
looking out of the carriage.” We don’t know who is missing or why—only
that someone has been elided. We are lucky even to know that there is
something we don’t know.
The October Revolution agitational-propaganda train arrives in Sorotskinskoe Station, in 1919. Photograph from Tate
There
is so much more that we don’t know about Stalinist terror—we are no
closer today to knowing how many people were killed than we were one,
two, or five decades ago. Earlier this month, news came
that the F.S.B., the successor agency to the K.G.B., is destroying
secret-police records from the terror era; that means that we are
unlikely ever to form a significantly more complete picture than the one
we have now.
Many
of the photographs in King’s collection showcase falsification by
commission rather than omission. There is the iconic photograph of
Stalin and the masses, in which the image of Stalin is blatantly pasted
in, and the masses, less noticeably, are composed of several repeating
fragments of crowd. There are the movie stills of the 1905 Russian
uprising and the pictures of the storming of the Winter Palace, in
1917—in fact, the images depict historical reënactments that were used
as though they were documentary photographs. And there are the enduring
myths that underlie the images. Much of the absence of documentary
evidence of the Soviet regime—the destruction of personal archives and
printed books alike—was a result of citizens’ fear that their neighbors
or acquaintances might report them to the authorities. We have since
learned that the role of such denunciations during the terror was
relatively minor: people were arrested to fill specific quotas; the
arrests were essentially random and not, as many have long assumed, the
result of reports. But the myth persists, and so does its product—the
visuals that have been destroyed can rarely be restored.
Vladimir
Lenin speaking in Moscow to Red Army soldiers departing for the Polish
front, in 1920. Leon Trotsky and Lev Borisovich Kamenev, behind, are on
the steps to the right. Photograph by G. P. Goldshtein / Tate
Leon Trotsky and Lev Borisovich Kamenev have been airbrushed out of an image of the same scene. Photograph by G. P. Goldshtein / Tate
Compared
to the intentional, crude, and pervasive altering of the Soviet record,
the lying currently prevalent in American politics is amateur hour, if
not exactly child’s play. President Donald Trump’s routine alterations
of the historical narrative, which seem to stem in equal measure from
ignorance and ill intent, are ridiculed by the media even as the media
reproduces them. Photographs often serve as the corrective to his
distortions—as, for example, with his insistence that he had the biggest
Inauguration crowd in history. Still, there can be no doubt that Trump
is waging an all-out war on the media, the historical record, and the
truth in general. In her 1967 essay, Arendt issued a warning:
“The chances of factual truth surviving the onslaught of power are
very slim indeed; it is always in danger of being maneuvered out of
the world not only for a time but, potentially, forever. Facts and
events are infinitely more fragile things than axioms, discoveries,
theories—even the most wildly speculative ones—produced by the
human mind; they occur in the field of the ever-changing affairs of
men, in whose flux there is nothing more permanent than the admittedly
relative permanence of the human mind’s structure. Once they are lost,
no rational effort will ever bring them back.”
Kliment
Voroshilov, Vyacheslav Molotov, Joseph Stalin, and Nikolai Yezhov
walking along the banks of the Moscow-Volga Canal, in April, 1937. Photograph by F. Kislov / Tate
Nikolai Yezhov has been removed from the original image. Photograph by F. Kislov / Tate
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