In the shadows of Soviet power, a secret war was being waged - not with guns and bombs, but with brushes, chemicals, and darkroom tricks. Welcome to the world of Stalin's photo manipulators, where history was rewritten one snapshot at a time.

 

Stalin's rise to power in the 1920s coincided with a period of intense political struggle within the Soviet Union. As he consolidated his control, Stalin recognized the power of visual propaganda in shaping public perception. In 1922, a pivotal moment in this propaganda war occurred when a photograph of Stalin and Lenin sitting side-by-side appeared in every newspaper across the Soviet Union. But everything wasn't as it seemed. The photograph was a fake.

 

This carefully crafted image gave the impression that Stalin and Lenin were close friends, when they were anything but. In reality, "Lenin described Stalin as intolerably rude and capricious and recommended that he be removed from his position as the Communist Party's secretary general". Stalin's photo technicians went to work, creating a new reality. They made it appear as if the two men were sitting side-by-side, implying that Stalin was Lenin's heir apparent. They also "smoothed Stalin's pockmarked complexion, lengthened his disfigured left arm, and increased his stature so that Lenin seems to recede benignly". This photograph is believed to be the first time Stalin used photo manipulation to create his own version of reality, but it certainly wouldn't be the last.

In the tightly controlled Soviet media landscape, photoshopped images served many purposes. They reinforced Stalin's narrative of being Lenin's chosen successor, erased political rivals from the history books, and presented an idealised version of Soviet life to both domestic and international audiences. The ubiquity of these manipulated images in newspapers, posters, and official publications helped create an alternate reality that millions of Soviet citizens were forced to accept as truth.

 

Photo editing became a powerful form of censorship, allowing Stalin to rewrite the past. As George Orwell would later write, Stalin understood that "who controls the past controls the future". One example of this practice was the treatment of Leon Trotsky. After mounting a failed opposition to Stalin's leadership, Trotsky was exiled to Siberia. Stalin then purged Trotsky's memory by erasing him from all official photographs, media, and records.

 

This practice became commonplace with other party officials who had fallen out of Stalin's favour and were now deemed political enemies. Sometimes a single photo was retouched multiple times over several years. "In one photograph, Stalin is shown with a group of three of his deputies. As each deputy fell out of favour, they were snipped out of the photo until only Stalin remained."

Not even the architect of the Great Purge was safe. Nikolai Yezhov, the chief of the NKVD (later called the KGB), carried out the arrests, deportations, and executions of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians. After falling out of favour in 1938, he was arrested, tried, and executed, becoming a victim of the systematic terror he himself had helped create. Yezhov's erasure from history was symbolised by a famous photograph. In 1937, he had been photographed walking along the banks of the Moscow-Volga Canal beside Stalin. After his death, Yezhov was erased from the photograph and replaced with water.

 

By the 1940s, Stalin's army of retouchers had progressed from simple retouching to falsifying reality. Their methods were surprisingly sophisticated for the time, relying on a combination of darkroom techniques and physical alteration of negatives and prints. These included composite imaging, airbrushing, negative retouching, double exposure, and forced perspective. These techniques required considerable skill and patience, often involving hours of painstaking work to achieve the desired result.

 

As Berlin fell in the closing days of WWII, Red Army photographer Yevgeny Khaldei staged a photo of several soldiers raising the Soviet flag on the roof of the Reichstag building. Inspired by the American flag-raising photograph at Iwo Jima, this iconic image represented the final defeat of Germany in a war that had cost the USSR nearly 30 million lives. However, even this triumphant moment required editing. Khaldei's editor noticed that one of the soldiers was wearing a wristwatch on each arm, indicating that he had been looting. The photograph was edited to remove the extra watch, to appease Stalin and potentially save the soldier's life.

The constant manipulation of visual evidence had profound effects on the Soviet people. It created an atmosphere of uncertainty and fear, where citizens could never be sure of what was real and what was fabricated. People began to question their own memories when confronted with contradictory "official" photographs, leading to a culture of self-censorship and paranoia. During the Great Purge, civilians even participated in their own form of photo editing. Fearing association with Stalin's enemies, many would deface or destroy photographs, magazines, or books containing images of those who had fallen out of favour.

 

The act of erasing reality and truth through photo falsification under Stalin's rule means "that it is possible to tell the story of the Soviet era through retouched photographs". While Stalin's regime may have perfected the art of photo manipulation for political ends, the practice has evolved. Today, deep fakes and voice cloning make it easier than ever to alter reality. It’s become increasingly difficult to distinguish between reality and fabrication, which has led to the spread of "fake news" on social media. The lessons of Stalin's era are a reminder that images can shape perceptions and rewrite history.