The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin's Russia - Review

of recent origin York: Henry Holt, Metropolitan volumes 1997. 192 pp.; 4 color ills., 271 b/w $3500

A slim convolution with little text and replete of intriguing and somewhat perverted pictures, The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin's Russia is perhaps the greatest in quantity significant recent book published upon the use of images in the Soviet era. Its central claim is an important one: the manipulated photograph stands as the cornerstone of Joseph Stalin's ideological cast And though the text does not elaborate this argument at any great longitudinal dimensions the book provides an invaluable starting point for a increase the depth ofed understanding of the role of photography in the totalitarian state.

The Commissar Vanishes presents a broad selection of visual material gathered above the last thirty years by the agency of David King. A historian interested in the political uses of images, King has published a photographically illustrated biography of Leon Trotsky whose face in the not away volume dissolves again and again into an airbrushed haze. drawn out known by Soviet specialists, King's work stands as an archaeology within the archive of Soviet agriculture accomplished in the face of innumerable barriers. end the process of collection, King traces multiple generations of images - the manipulations frequently juxtaposed with the original print - to bring out a multilayered structure that works against the coercive teleology of Stalin's be in possession of enterprise.

The implicit claims of The Commissar Vanishes present tremendous insight into Stalinist visual representation and particularly the shoot forward of Socialist Realism itself. The first of these, revealed by the agency of the scope of the collection, is the real pervasiveness of photographic manipulation in the construction of Soviet history - its perfect systematization. Such excess, of course, speaks of tremendous anxiety - an anxiety endemic to one as well as the other official culture and the population at large. Beyond the administrative industry of censorship (though individual cannot help but wonder at what must have been its vastness), private citizens afraid to be caught with compromising images repeatedly defaced their own books. (In a haunting image included in The Commissar Vanishes, the artist Aleksandr Rodchenko used India ink to dark the faces of certain officials in the work Ten Years of Uzbekistan, which he had designed himself.) plane at home, these individuals thus became integral - if involuntary - participants in Stalin's perpetual rewriting (and reimaging) of history. The collection here attests to the symbiosis of ideological apparatuses with directly coercive individuals - a powerful combined force in the production of a monological system

King's photographs demonstrate the flexibility of the strategy of manipulation as well. The variety of extreme points for which image-altering processes were used overlay a wide spectrum: smoothing Stalin's pockmarked face and removing litter from the leader's path; inserting body on banners within photographs for a like reason that the idea becomes legible (for example, "Down with the Monarchy" within a photograph of a demonstration); enlarging an adulatory host through montage; or isolating the figure of Stalin from a clump As the title indicates, King's volume focuses on the multiple disappearances of individuals from photographs - particularly during the period of terror against the one and the other Communist officials and ordinary citizens, which peaked in the late 1930 and continued until Stalin's death in 1953

Manipulation, however, also serv an additive function, greatest in quantity notably the repeated insertion of Stalin himself into the revolutionary narrative. Many of these latter photographic reworkings address a particular historical double bind: if the legitimacy of succession in the Soviet a whole depended on proximity to Lenin and a central part within the Russian Revolution, and Stalin stood at the margins in the two senses, how could Stalin's legitimacy be claimed? (Hints of a traumatic neurosis produc by dint of Stalin's initial absence exist in these repetitive restagings, which attempt in a Freudian faculty of perception to master the stimulus retrospectively.) The successive variations of an image of delegates to the Eighth Congres of the Bolshevik Party, of March 1919 trace Stalin's self-propell trajectory: from a concourseed photo of twenty-plus individuals to the isolation of three figures (the ruling triumvirate of Stalin, Lenin, and Mikhail Kalinin), then of Stalin and Lenin together (suggesting collaboration, proximity, partnership), and culminating in an isolated image of Stalin himself. Stalin alone, the photograph asserts, made history. And in a different faculty of perception by peeling away the layers, King's volume explores the making of this history.

A wide variety of vandalistic techniques were used to achieve these ends: airbrush, scalpel, raw blacking out, cropping, or writing in. abundant of the manipulation in the images bring togethered by King aims to bring into view a seamless product, an illusion of plausibility that naturalizes ideology as mythology. on the other hand a surprising number of images appear to be to flaunt their scars - visible excisions, black shroud-like vesicles ghostly spaces within group photos, mysterious hands and flexures all combined with the senseles addition of round pillars bushes, even little houses with picket protecting enclosures The deliberate crudeness makes the violence of the imagery explicit, revealing itself as threat. This marking of absence strike one as beings to serve a dual purpose: it refuses identification of the excised individuals, denying their equal claim to neighborhood at the site of history - and perhaps also disallowing empathy - and it reminds the viewer of the pervasive power of the system