On the left, Lenin haranguing the troops leaving for the Polish front. Standing on some steps are Trotsky and Kamenev. The photograph, one of many of this scene, was taken by GP Goldstein. In the subsequent retouching, the image on the right, Trotsky and Kamenev are replaced by wooden steps. /
Stalin not only murdered but also erased people from history. Specifically, from the photos. Why did he do that, how did he do it and in what cases did it happen?
In ancient Rome, when you wanted to eradicate the memory of a person considered an enemy of the state, everything that referred to the condemned person was eliminated – images, monuments, inscriptions. This has been called – a posteriori, as Edgar Straehle warns – damnatio memoriae.
Various kinds of damnatio memoriae have been practiced by numerous peoples since ancient times, such as the Hittites, Babylonians or Egyptians.
Thus, the references that Titus Livy makes in his Ab Urbe Condita to the iconoclastic fury of the Athenians regarding the statues, portraits and inscriptions of Philip of Macedon stand out. And even more so are the various forms of “memory condemnation” that their fellow citizens practiced with those whose disastrous actions made them worthy of having all physical traces of their passage through the world disappear, a previous step for their memory to be lost in the nebula of the times.
The management of collective memory, at least in that part that has to do with the relationship between present and past, is something that has always seduced those in power.
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Some, like Cleisthenes, the great Athenian legislator, in his desire to build a new state based on the equality of citizens before the law, might act out of a plausible desire to erase all traces of oligarchs or tyrants. In fact, there is no shortage of people who suggest that the damnatio memoriae was also a way of drawing attention – to evoke the past from the present, we would say today – about disastrous or execrable actions that should not be forgotten. Thus, the destruction of the vestiges of that past would also fulfill a prophylactic and educational mission, and this can only be effective when it becomes visible.
From Rome to the USSR
This double reading explains why there is no unanimity when it comes to considering, as Enzo Traverso suggests without going any further, that the elimination of certain characters from official Soviet images under Stalinism constitutes another form of
damnation of memory.
In the original photo, from left to right, Nikolai Antipov (former People’s Commissar for Posts and Telegraphs of the USSR), Joseph Stalin, Sergei Kirov and Nikolai Shvernik. Each of the members in the original photo was removed as they fell from grace. /
In the original photo, from left to right, Nikolai Antipov (former People’s Commissar for Posts and Telegraphs of the USSR), Joseph Stalin, Sergei Kirov and Nikolai Shvernik. Each of the members in the original photo was removed as they fell from grace. Wikimedia Commons
Charles W. Hedrick, for example, by highlighting the selective forgetting and remembering of VN Flavianus’s actions by Roman elites, rejects such an association and underlines the different goals pursued by both practices in the Roman world and in the Soviet Union.
The truth is, however, that such purposes did not have to be identical within the same culture, nor were the times or contexts. Sometimes what prevailed was the search for legitimacy of the new ruler; in others the public and the private were mixed, as when what was underlying was the dispute for power between diverse families; in others, finally, the desire to appropriate the achievements of the predecessor.
Nor, as Hedrick himself suggests, could the means available to the Roman State be comparable with those of a totalitarian regime such as the Soviet: very limited when it came to guaranteeing the effectiveness of the “sentence of memory” in the first case and of much greater amplitude in its effects in the second. The disparity of objectives and resources constitute, in my opinion, the two essential elements on which we must emphasize when interpreting the particular damnatio memoriae of Stalinism, manifested in the hundreds of images collected and analyzed by David King.
what Stalin did
As a starting point, it would be necessary to distinguish between the photographic manipulation aimed at transmitting a more presentable image of the leader or the achievements of the regime and that which really sought to erase from history those who made them uncomfortable. Concealing Iósif Stalin’s wrinkles or softening his stern gesture, as well as hiding the dirt on the streets, walls or buildings that surrounded the leaders in their pose, would seem to go no further than a political marketing operation.
However, even in their most minute aspects, these actions were part of a much larger and fanatical program: the “cult of personality”, denounced by Nikita Khrushchev in his famous speech at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party.
Stalin’s obsession with making the image of Leon Trotsky disappear from many photographs is explained by the political and ideological confrontation they had in their struggle to attain power, which would ultimately lead the latter to exile and death.
Bolshevik revolutionary GE Zinoviev at the unveiling of a monument to German socialists Ferdinand Lassalle and Karl Marx, Petrograd 1918. The photo was retrospectively edited by Soviet censors in the 1930s, in which Zinoviev’s face was smudged. /
Not very different was what happened with Lev Kamenev, his initial ally in his confrontation with Trotsky, but who already in December 1925 had come to publicly request the dismissal of Stalin from the post of general secretary. Eleven years later, in the context of the “Great Purge”, which began in December 1934, Kamenev would be executed and his image removed, using a scalpel and an airbrush, from the famous photograph in which he shared the stage with an exultant Lenin in his harangue to the troops leaving for the Polish front.
Yezhov, the People’s Commissar of the Interior who had led the great purges of the 1930s, ended up being one more victim of them when his fury became uncomfortable for the leader and, consequently, an unrecommended companion in the well-known image on the that he is seen walking with Stalin and Molotov on the occasion of the construction of the Volga canal.
Many others, such as Alexander Malchenko, Isaac Zelensky, Grigori Zinoviev, Nikolai Bukharin, Karl Radek, Nikolai Antipov, Sergei Kirov or Nikolai Shvernik, “disappeared” for the same or similar reasons.
At higher levels of autocracy, the despot tends to be more tempted to apply the «memory sentence» to those who are perceived as a threat at a given moment. Sometimes, even after assassinating them, because the mere evocation of the executed person can undermine the idolatry towards the leader.
Perhaps that is why it is commonplace to bring up the parallels between the reality imagined by George Orwell in his dystopian 1984 and Stalin’s Soviet Union. And that is why it is convenient to remain on alert, today as yesterday, against the aspiring officials of the “Ministry of Truth”, in charge of revising history and eliminating from it those who have fallen in disgrace.
This article has been published in ‘The Conversation‘.