Censorship of images in the Soviet Union

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An example of how the picture was altered again and again after each person fell out of favor with the Soviet regime.

After Joseph Stalin rose to power in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and became Soviet leader, he initiated a number of purges that eliminated perceived enemies. At first, a purge meant expulsion from the Communist Party, but after the Great Purge in the 1930s members were arrested, imprisoned, sent to gulags or to internal exile in Siberia, or executed. The Soviet government attempted to erase some purged figures from Soviet history, and took measures which included altering images, destroying film, and in the most extreme cases, killing off entire families.^[1]

[edit] Flag on the Reichstag

As Berlin fell in the closing days of the Great Patriotic War (the Soviet term for World War II in Europe, especially the Eastern Front), the Red Army photographer Yevgeny Khaldei was looking to top the American flag raising on Iwo Jima. Sensing his chance on May 2, 1945 he gathered some soldiers and posed a shot of them hoisting the flag (called the Victory Banner) on the roof of the Reichstag building—a largely symbolic move, as the building had not been the seat of German power since the 1933 Reichstag fire. An earlier flag had been raised the day before while the building was being fought over with Nazi holdouts. However, as the flag was raised after dusk, there was no chance to take an image.

Khaldei edited the image because the man supporting the flag-bearer was wearing two watches, implying that he had looted at least one. While airbrushing out the watches Khaldei also enhanced the smoke in the background to make the scene more dramatic.

After taking the shot with the flag Khaldei rushed back to Moscow with his modus operandi. It was later decided that the true persons on the photo, Kovaliev and his comrade, were not politically correct. So they became Meliton Kantaria (a Georgian, like Stalin) and Mikhail Iegorev (a Russian). The true protagonists of the photo emerged only after 1991 with the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

[edit] Yevgeny Khaldei

Khaldei was born in a Jewish family in Ukraine and had been obsessed with photography since childhood, having built his first childhood camera out of his grandmother's glasses. He started working with the Soviet press agency TASS at the age of 19 as a press photographer.

Khaldei was also witness to several pivotal moments in history and is particularly reputed for his photographs during World War II and the Nuremberg Trials. Khaldei worked with the TASS until 1949, when he was fired due to the growing antisemitism in the Soviet state. For the next ten years, he worked as a private freelance photographer, focusing on scenes from everyday life. In 1959, he got a job again at the newspaper Pravda, where he worked until he was forced to retire in 1970, again because of his Jewish background.^[2] Khaldei's international fame dates from the fall of the Soviet Union, in 1991, as the photographer of the image was never published by the Soviet authorities.

[edit] The Water Commissar

Yezhov is clearly visible to Stalin's left. The photo was later altered by censors.

This image taken by the Moscow Canal was altered when Nikolai Yezhov was water commissar. After he fell from power, he was arrested, shot, and removed by the censors.

[edit] Nikolai Yezhov

Main article: Nikolai Yezhov

Yezhov was born in Saint Petersburg and from 1915 to 1917, Yezhov served in the Tsarist Russian army. He joined the Bolsheviks on May 5, 1917 in Vitebsk, a few months before the October Revolution. During the Russian Civil War 1919–1921 he fought in the Red Army. After February 1922, he worked in the political system rising in 1934 to the Central Committee of the Communist Party; in the next year he became a secretary of the Central Committee. From February 1935 to March 1939 he was also the Chairman of the Central Commission for Party Control.

In 1935 he wrote a paper in which he argued that political opposition must eventually lead to violence and terrorism; this became in part the ideological basis of the Purges.^[3] He became People's Commissar for Internal Affairs (head of the NKVD) and a member of the Presidium Central Executive Committee on September 26, 1936. Under Yezhov, the purges reached their height, with roughly half of the Soviet political and military establishment being imprisoned or shot, along with hundreds of thousands of others, suspected of disloyalty or "wrecking." Ironically he himself fell out of Stalin's favour and on April 10, 1939 he was arrested and on February 4, 1940 he was shot.^[4]

[edit] Lenin's Speech

Trotsky is seen in the foreground with Lev Kamenev. The photo was later altered and both were removed by censors.

On May 5, 1920, Lenin gave a famous speech to a crowd of Soviet troops. In the foreground was Leon Trotsky and Lev Kamenev. The photo was later altered and both were removed by censors.

[edit] Leon Trotsky

Main article: Leon Trotsky

Leon Trotsky (Russian:Лeв Давидович Трóцкий) was a Ukrainian-born Bolshevik revolutionary and Marxist theorist. He was an influential politician in the early days of the Soviet Union, first as People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs and later as the founder and commander of the Red Army and People's Commissar of War. He was also among the first members of the Politburo.

He became an enemy of the State and was erased from Soviet history after leading the failed struggle of the Left Opposition against the policies and rise of Joseph Stalin in the 1920s and the increasing bureaucratization of the Soviet Union. Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party and deported from the Soviet Union in the Great Purge. As the head of the Fourth International, he continued in exile to oppose the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, and was eventually assassinated in Mexico by Ramón Mercader, a Soviet agent.^[5] Trotsky's ideas form the basis of Trotskyism, a variation of communist theory, which remains a major school of Marxist thought that is opposed to the theories of Stalinism.

[edit] October Revolution celebration

Taken on November 7, 1919 while celebrating the second anniversary of the October Revolution three people, Trotsky, Lev Kamenev and Khalatov were edited out.

On November 7, 1919 this image was snapped of the Soviet leadership celebrating the second anniversary of the October Revolution. After Trotsky and his allies fell from power, a number of figures were removed from the image, including Trotsky and two people over to Lenin's left, wearing glasses and giving a salute. Lev Kamenev two men over on Lenin's right was another of Stalin's opponents and below the boy in front of Trotsky, another bearded figure, Khalatov the one time Commissar of publishing, was also edited out.

[edit] Lev Kamenev

Kamenev was born in Moscow, the son of a Jewish railway worker and a Russian Orthodox housewife. ^[6] He joined the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) in 1901 and its Bolshevik faction when the party split into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in August 1903. ^[7] He climbed the ranks of the Soviet leadership and was briefly the nominal head of the Soviet state in 1917 and later chairman (1923-1924) of the ruling Politburo.

After Sergei Kirov's murder on December 1, 1934, which precipitated Stalin's Great Purges, Zinoviev, Kamenev and their closest associates were once again expelled from the Communist Party and arrested in December 1934. They were tried in January 1935 and were forced to admit "moral complicity" in Kirov's assassination. Zinoviev was sentenced to 10 years in prison, Kamenev to five years in prison. Kamenev was charged separately in early 1935 in connection with the Kremlin Case and, although he refused to confess, was sentenced to ten years in prison.

In August 1936, after months of careful preparations and rehearsals in Soviet secret police prisons, Zinoviev, Kamenev and 14 others, mostly Old Bolsheviks, were put on trial again in the Moscow Trials. Kamenev and all the others were found guilty and were executed by shooting on August 25, 1936.

[edit] Postcard

Taken in 1917 the signs have been changed

Main article: October Revolution

On November 7, 1917, Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin led his leftist revolutionaries in a revolt against the ineffective Provisional Government (Russia was still using the Julian Calendar at the time, so period references still call it the October revolution). The October Revolution ended the phase of the revolution instigated in February of that year, replacing Russia's short-lived provisional parliamentary government with government by soviets, local councils elected by bodies of workers and peasants. Liberal and monarchist forces, loosely organized into the White Army, immediately went to war against the Bolsheviks' Red Army.

During the Revolution a number of pictures were taken of successful fighters celebrating their victories. These were often used as postcards after the war. In this pair you can see that the original image has Soviet fighters shown cheering on a street. In the background is a store that says in Russian, "Watches, gold and silver." The image was then changed to read, "Struggle for your rights." Also a flag that before was a solid color before reads, "Down with the monarchy - long live the Republic!"^[8].

[edit] Union of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class

Alexander Malchenko has been edited out

The Union for Struggle of the Liberation of the Working Class was a St Petersburg based organization that was founded by a number of Russian revolutionaries including Mikhail Kalinin and Lenin. They would merge with other groups to lay the foundation for the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDRP)^[9]. The RSDRP formed in 1898 in Minsk to unite the various revolutionary organizations into one party. It would later split into Bolshevik and Menshevik factions, with the Bolsheviks eventually becoming the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

This picture is a meeting of the St. Petersburg chapter of the Union of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class taken in February of 1897. Shortly after the picture was taken the whole group was arrested by the Okhrana. The members were handed out various punishments with Lenin being arrested, held by authorities for fourteen months and then released and exiled to the village of Shushenskoye in Siberia, where he mingled with such notable Marxists as Georgy Plekhanov, who had introduced socialism to Russia.

To the left standing is Alexander Malchenko. At the time of this picture he was an engineering student and his mother would let Lenin hide out at her house. After his arrest he spent some time in exile before returning in 1900 and abandoning the revolution. He moved to Moscow where he worked as a senior engineer in various state departments before in 1929 being arrested, wrongfully accused of being a "wrecker" and executed on November 18, 1930. After his arrest and execution he was airbrushed out of all reproductions of this image. In 1958 he was posthumously rehabilitated and was allowed to reappear in reproductions of the image.

[edit] References