The Vanishing Commissar: Photo Fakes Before Photoshop

In one photograph, Joseph Stalin walks beside a canal with Vyacheslav Molotov and another official. At his left shoulder is a young-looking man in a military cap: Nikolai Yezhov, the head of Stalin's secret police. In a later version of the same picture, Yezhov is gone. Where he stood there is only the water of the canal.

Historians call Yezhov the Vanishing Commissar. His case is the best-known example of a practice the Soviet state used for decades: when people fell from favour, they were removed from pictures as well as from power. All of it was done by hand, long before computers, and many of the edits have since been found out.

Who Yezhov was

Nikolai Yezhov, born in 1895, led the NKVD, Stalin's secret police, from 1936 to 1938, at the height of the Great Purge. He organised mass arrests, torture and executions; ordinary citizens were accused of disloyalty on flimsy or no evidence. The period is still known in Russian as the Yezhovshchina, the Yezhov times.

Then he fell. In August 1938 Lavrentiy Beria was made his deputy, and in November Yezhov was relieved of his post, with Beria taking over. Yezhov was arrested in April 1939, an arrest hidden from the public and from most NKVD officers, and he was shot on 4 February 1940. He was very short, about 151 centimetres, which earned him the nickname the Bloody Dwarf.

The photograph

The most famous picture of Yezhov shows him beside Stalin at the Moscow–Volga Canal. He was scrubbed from other official photographs too, but this one became the symbol. After his execution he was retouched out of it, and the canal was continued across the space where he had been, so the picture looks like an ordinary shot of Stalin and his companions. You can compare the two versions on this page.

Seen side by side, the two versions make the method obvious. That is exactly why the pair became famous. The originals were not all destroyed, and once researchers could compare them, every edit became evidence of what it was trying to hide.

Not the only one

Yezhov was far from alone. A photograph of Lenin addressing troops in Moscow on 5 May 1920 originally had Leon Trotsky and Lev Kamenev in the foreground; censors later removed both. A picture of the leadership celebrating the revolution's second anniversary in November 1919 lost Trotsky, Kamenev and several others.

Sometimes people came back. Alexander Malchenko, who appears in an 1897 group photograph with Lenin, was executed in 1930 and airbrushed out of reproductions, then reappeared after he was officially rehabilitated in 1958. And editing was not always about purges. The famous photograph of a Soviet flag raised over the Reichstag in 1945 was retouched to remove a second watch from a soldier's wrist, a sign of looting, and smoke was added to make the scene more dramatic.

How it was done without computers

Not every edit is a lie. Ansel Adams darkened and lightened parts of his landscapes in the darkroom, and that is accepted as part of the art. What made the Soviet edits different was the purpose: to change the record of who had been there.

Photo manipulation is almost as old as photography. Before software, editors retouched prints with ink and paint, sprayed fine paint with an airbrush, combined several negatives in the darkroom, bleached areas out, or scratched the film. One early portrait of Abraham Lincoln is really his head placed on the body of another politician, John Calhoun.

Soviet censors used the same hand methods. A skilled retoucher could paint over a figure and carry the background across the gap, whether that was a wall, a crowd or, in Yezhov's case, the water of a canal. In group pictures the gap was sometimes simply closed up, leaving people standing oddly far apart.

Why the edits backfired

Removing someone from a photograph can create a bigger story than leaving them in. When the cosmonaut Valentin Bondarenko died in a training accident in 1961, he was airbrushed out of pictures of the first cosmonaut group. Because he had already appeared in public photographs, the changes fed rumours that cosmonauts had died in secret failed launches. His existence and the cause of his death stayed secret until 1986.

The same pattern appears whenever information is visibly removed. Our article on why redacted files fuel conspiracy theories looks at how gaps in official records invite people to imagine what was taken out.

How fakes like these are caught

Most of these edits were caught the simplest way: someone found another print or an earlier publication of the same picture and compared them. David King's book The Commissar Vanishes, published in 1997, collects many such before-and-after pairs from Stalin's Russia.

Other clues can be found in a single image: textures that repeat, edges that are too smooth, shadows or perspective that do not fit, and gaps in a group where people stand oddly far apart. Our guide on how experts check if an old photo is fake explains the checks step by step, and famous hoax photos collects other cases worth comparing.