ISBN: Ostalo
Godina izdanja: 1997
Jezik: Engleski
Autor: Strani

Veliki format. U dobrom stanju, hrbat zaštitnog omota osunčan.

The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin`s Russia

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Metropolitan Books; 1st edition (October 1, 1997)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 192 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0805052941
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0805052947
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.7 pounds

“Under Stalin’s regime... photographs lied. In David King’s unique and revealing book, the same photographs, their original images restored, speak volumes of truth…

Considering the five decades of official falsifications and zealous concealment, David King’s book is heroic—the product of an immense, one-man archaeology.”
—from the preface by Stephen F. Cohen, Princeton University

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 air- brushed from group portraits, and crowd scenes were altered to depict even greater legions of the faithful. In one famous image, several extraneous 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. King began his collection during a trip to Russia in 1970, when he discovered that thousands of images of Stalin’s victims had been lost to posterity— either by design or neglect. 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 air- brushers 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.

In perhaps the most macabre sequence of all, The Commissar Vanishes reproduces photographs from a book in the personal library of a prominent Soviet artist. The faces of the subjects, many of them dissidents purged under Stalin, had been crudely blacked out in ink: the owner had been required by law to censor his own books.

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.

*****
DAVID KING has produced and designed many books on Soviet subjects, including a photographic biography of Leon Trotsky. The art editor of the London Sunday Times magazine from 1965 to 1975, King lives in London.
*****
STEPHEN F. COHEN is Professor of Politics and Russian Studies at Princeton University and the author of several books, including Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution and Rethinking the Soviet Experience.
*****

In Stalinist Russia, it was commonplace for Soviet history to be rewritten with inconvenient participants removed--often men or women who had aided the Communist Revolution in the early days and then had somehow fallen afoul of Stalin himself. In The Commissar Vanishes, English art historian David King assembles an impressive body of photographs and artwork that shows the process whereby a hero could overnight be made into villain. `The physical eradication of Stalin`s political opponents at the hands of the secret police was swiftly followed by their obliteration from all forms of pictorial existence,` King rightly notes: in one noteworthy sequence reproduced on the cover, a photograph of Stalin with three revolutionary leaders is airbrushed and cropped and clipped until, one by one, those leaders disappear and only Stalin is left--conveying the message that Stalin carried the Russian Revolution by himself. Another photograph from the 1920s depicts a meeting of dozens of trade-union and Bolshevik leaders; by the late 1930s, all but a handful of them had been murdered at Stalin`s orders. King`s work restores some of these men and women to history and illustrates the essential inhumanity of totalitarian thought.

From Kirkus Reviews
The doctoring of photographs didn`t begin with the advent of computers in magazine production departments. "So much falsification took place during the Stalin years that it is possible to tell the story of the Soviet era through retouched photographs," writes King. For Joseph Stalin, photo retouching was a technique for controlling public perception and memory. People who vanished in real life--whether banished to the farthest reaches of the Soviet Union or eliminated by the secret police--vanished as well from photos, and even paintings. In many cases they were airbrushed out completely, in others their faces were clumsily blacked out with ink. This creepy visual rewriting of history is documented here by King, who has been collecting such revised images since 1970, when he found Leon Trotsky completely expunged from official Soviet archives. Placing original photos alongside the altered ones, King also explains in lengthy captions who has vanished and why. A disturbing testament to the destruction wrought when a megalomaniac becomes a dictator. (History Book Club selection) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.



staljin, sssr, rusija, revolucija, antikomunizam, trockizam