Censorship of images in the Soviet Union

Joseph Stalin

Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...

rose to power in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

Communist Party of the Soviet Union

The Communist Party of the Soviet Union was the only legal, ruling political party in the Soviet Union and one of the largest communist organizations in the world...

and became Soviet leader, he initiated a number of purges

Purge of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

Purges with a "small-p" purge was one of the key rituals during which a periodic review of party members was conducted to get rid of the "undesirables"....

that eliminated perceived enemies

Enemy of the people

The term enemy of the people is a fluid designation of political or class opponents of the group using the term. The term implies that the "enemies" in question are acting against society as a whole. It is similar to the notion of "enemy of the state". The term originated in Roman times as ,...

. At first, a purge meant expulsion from the Communist Party, but after the Great Purge

Great Purge

The Great Purge was a series of campaigns of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union orchestrated by Joseph Stalin from 1936 to 1938...

in the 1930s members were arrested, imprisoned, sent to gulag

Gulag

The Gulag was the government agency that administered the main Soviet forced labor camp systems. While the camps housed a wide range of convicts, from petty criminals to political prisoners, large numbers were convicted by simplified procedures, such as NKVD troikas and other instruments of...

s or to internal exile

Internal Exile

Internal Exile was Fish's second solo album after leaving Marillion in 1988. The album, released 28 October 1991, was inspired by the singer's past, his own personal problems and his troubled experiences with his previous record label EMI.The album's music reflects Fish's indulgence in the vast...

in Siberia

Siberia

Siberia is an extensive region constituting almost all of Northern Asia. Comprising the central and eastern portion of the Russian Federation, it was part of the Soviet Union from its beginning, as its predecessor states, the Tsardom of Russia and the Russian Empire, conquered it during the 16th...

, or executed. The Soviet government attempted to erase some purged figures from Soviet history, and took measures which included altering images

Photo manipulation

Photo manipulation is the application of image editing techniques to photographs in order to create an illusion or deception , through analog or digital means.- Types of digital photo manipulation :...

, destroying film, and in the most extreme cases, killing off entire families.

The Water Commissar

This image taken by the Moscow Canal

Moscow Canal

The Moscow Canal , named the Moscow-Volga Canal until the year 1947, is a canal that connects the Moskva River with the main transportation artery of European Russia, the Volga River. It is located in Moscow itself and in the Moscow Oblast...

was taken when Nikolai Yezhov

Nikolai Yezhov

Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov or Ezhov was a senior figure in the NKVD under Joseph Stalin during the period of the Great Purge. His reign is sometimes known as the "Yezhovshchina" , "the Yezhov era", a term that began to be used during the de-Stalinization campaign of the 1950s...

was water commissar. After he fell from power, he was arrested, shot, and his image removed by the censors.

Nikolai Yezhov

Yezhov was born in Saint Petersburg

Saint Petersburg

Saint Petersburg is a city and a federal subject of Russia located on the Neva River at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea...

and from 1915 to 1917, Yezhov served in the Tsarist Russian army. He joined the Bolsheviks on May 5, 1917 in Vitebsk

Vitebsk

Vitebsk, also known as Viciebsk or Vitsyebsk , is a city in Belarus, near the border with Russia. The capital of the Vitebsk Oblast, in 2004 it had 342,381 inhabitants, making it the country's fourth largest city...

, a few months before the October Revolution

October Revolution

The October Revolution , also known as the Great October Socialist Revolution , Red October, the October Uprising or the Bolshevik Revolution, was a political revolution and a part of the Russian Revolution of 1917...

. During the Russian Civil War

Russian Civil War

The Russian Civil War was a multi-party war that occurred within the former Russian Empire after the Russian provisional government collapsed to the Soviets, under the domination of the Bolshevik party. Soviet forces first assumed power in Petrograd The Russian Civil War (1917–1923) was a...

1919–1921 he fought in the Red Army

Red Army

The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army started out as the Soviet Union's revolutionary communist combat groups during the Russian Civil War of 1918-1922. It grew into the national army of the Soviet Union. By the 1930s the Red Army was among the largest armies in history.The "Red Army" name refers to...

. 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. He became People's Commissar for Internal Affairs (head of the NKVD) and a member of the Presidium Central Executive Committee

Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

The Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union , abbreviated in Russian as ЦК, "Tse-ka", earlier was also called as the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party ...

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

Wrecking (Soviet crime)

Wrecking , was a crime specified in the criminal code of the Soviet Union in the Stalin era. It is often translated as "sabotage"; however "wrecking" and "diversionist acts" and "counter-revolutionary sabotage" were distinct sub-articles of Article 58 , and the meaning of "wrecking" is closer to...

." Yezhov himself fell out of Stalin's favour and on April 10, 1939 he was arrested and on February 4, 1940 he was shot.

Lenin's Speech

On May 5, 1920, Lenin gave a famous speech to a crowd of Soviet troops in Sverdlov Square, Moscow. In the foreground was Leon Trotsky

Leon Trotsky

Leon Trotsky , born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and theorist, Soviet politician, and the founder and first leader of the Red Army....

and Lev Kamenev

Lev Kamenev

Lev Borisovich Kamenev , born Rozenfeld , was a Bolshevik revolutionary and a prominent Soviet politician. He was briefly head of state of the new republic in 1917, and from 1923-24 the acting Premier in the last year of Lenin's life....

. The photo was later altered and both were removed by censors.

Leon Trotsky

Leon Trotsky was a Ukrainian

Ukraine

Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...

-born Bolshevik

Bolshevik

The Bolsheviks, originally also Bolshevists , derived from bol'shinstvo, "majority") were a faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party which split apart from the Menshevik faction at the Second Party Congress in 1903....

revolutionary and Marxist

Marxism

Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...

theorist. He was an influential politician in the early days of the Soviet Union

Soviet Union

The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

, first as People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs and later as the founder and commander of the Red Army

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

Left Opposition

The Left Opposition was a faction within the Bolshevik Party from 1923 to 1927, headed de facto by Leon Trotsky. The Left Opposition formed as part of the power struggle within the party leadership that began with the Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin's illness and intensified with his death in January...

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

Fourth International

The Fourth International is the communist international organisation consisting of followers of Leon Trotsky , with the declared dedicated goal of helping the working class bring about socialism...

, he continued in exile to oppose the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, and was eventually assassinated in Mexico

Mexico

The United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of...

by Ramón Mercader

Ramón Mercader

Jaime Ramón Mercader del Río Hernández was a Spanish communist who became famous as the murderer of Russian Communist ideologist Leon Trotsky in 1940, in Mexico...

, a Soviet agent who used an ice axe to fatally stab Trotsky. Trotsky's ideas form the basis of Trotskyism

Trotskyism

Trotskyism is the theory of Marxism as advocated by Leon Trotsky. Trotsky considered himself an orthodox Marxist and Bolshevik-Leninist, arguing for the establishment of a vanguard party of the working-class...

, a variation of communist theory, which remains a major school of Marxist

Marxism

thought that is opposed to the theories of Stalinism

Stalinism

Stalinism refers to the ideology that Joseph Stalin conceived and implemented in the Soviet Union, and is generally considered a branch of Marxist–Leninist ideology but considered by some historians to be a significant deviation from this philosophy...

October Revolution celebration

On November 7, 1919 this image was snapped of the Soviet leadership celebrating the second anniversary of the October Revolution

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

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, Artemic Bagratovich Khalatov the one time Commissar of publishing, was also edited out.

Lev Kamenev

Kamenev was born in Moscow

Moscow

Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...

, the son of a Jewish railway worker and a Russian Orthodox

Russian Orthodox Church

The Russian Orthodox Church or, alternatively, the Moscow Patriarchate The ROC is often said to be the largest of the Eastern Orthodox churches in the world; including all the autocephalous churches under its umbrella, its adherents number over 150 million worldwide—about half of the 300 million...

housewife. He joined the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) in 1901 and its Bolshevik faction when the party split into Bolsheviks and Menshevik

Menshevik

The Mensheviks were a faction of the Russian revolutionary movement that emerged in 1904 after a dispute between Vladimir Lenin and Julius Martov, both members of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party. The dispute originated at the Second Congress of that party, ostensibly over minor issues...

s in August 1903. 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

Joseph Stalin

Great Purges, Zinoviev

Grigory Zinoviev

Grigory Yevseevich Zinoviev , born Ovsei-Gershon Aronovich Radomyslsky Apfelbaum , was a Bolshevik revolutionary and a Soviet Communist politician...

, 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 Bolshevik

Old Bolshevik

Old Bolshevik , also Old Bolshevik Guard or Old Party Guard, was an unofficial designation for those who were members of the Bolshevik party before the Russian Revolution of 1917, many of whom were either tried and executed by the NKVD during Stalin era purges or died under suspicious...

s, were put on trial again in the Moscow Trials

Moscow Trials

The Moscow Trials were a series of show trials conducted in the Soviet Union and orchestrated by Joseph Stalin during the Great Purge of the 1930s. The victims included most of the surviving Old Bolsheviks, as well as the leadership of the Soviet secret police...

. Kamenev and all the others were found guilty and were executed by shooting

Execution by shooting

Execution by shooting is a form of capital punishment whereby an executed person is shot by one or more firearms. It is the most common method of execution worldwide, used in about 70 countries, with execution by firing squad being one particular form...

on August 25, 1936.

Postcard

On November 7, 1917, Bolshevik

Bolshevik

leader Vladimir Lenin

Vladimir Lenin

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and communist politician who led the October Revolution of 1917. As leader of the Bolsheviks, he headed the Soviet state during its initial years , as it fought to establish control of Russia in the Russian Civil War and worked to create a...

led his leftist revolutionaries in a revolt against the ineffective Provisional Government (Russia was still using the Julian Calendar

Julian calendar

The Julian calendar began in 45 BC as a reform of the Roman calendar by Julius Caesar. It was chosen after consultation with the astronomer Sosigenes of Alexandria and was probably designed to approximate the tropical year .The Julian calendar has a regular year of 365 days divided into 12 months...

at the time, so it is still called 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 soviet

Soviet (council)

Soviet was a name used for several Russian political organizations. Examples include the Czar's Council of Ministers, which was called the “Soviet of Ministers”; a workers' local council in late Imperial Russia; and the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union....

s, 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

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. The background of the original image includes a store that says in Russian, "Watches, gold and silver". The image was then changed to read, "Struggle for your rights", and flag that was a solid color before was changed to read, "Down with the monarchy - long live the Republic!".

Union of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class

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

Mikhail Kalinin

Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin , known familiarly by Soviet citizens as "Kalinych," was a Bolshevik revolutionary and the nominal head of state of Russia and later of the Soviet Union, from 1919 to 1946...

and Lenin. They would merge with other groups to lay the foundation for the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDRP)

Russian Social Democratic Labour Party

The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party , also known as Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party or Russian Social Democratic Party, was a revolutionary socialist Russian political party formed in 1898 in Minsk to unite the various revolutionary organizations into one party...

. The RSDRP formed in 1898 in Minsk

Minsk

- Ecological situation :The ecological situation is monitored by Republican Center of Radioactive and Environmental Control .During 2003–2008 the overall weight of contaminants increased from 186,000 to 247,400 tons. The change of gas as industrial fuel to mazut for financial reasons has worsened...

to unite the various revolutionary organizations into one party. It would later split into Bolshevik

Bolshevik

and Menshevik

Menshevik

factions, with the Bolsheviks eventually becoming the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

Communist Party of the Soviet Union

The Communist Party of the Soviet Union was the only legal, ruling political party in the Soviet Union and one of the largest communist organizations in the world...

.

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 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

Shushenskoye

Shushenskoye is an urban locality in the southern portion of Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia, located at the confluence of the Yenisei and Big Shush. Population:...

in Siberia

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

Wrecking (Soviet crime)

" 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.

Lost cosmonaut

After cosmonaut Valentin Bondarenko

Valentin Bondarenko

Valentin Vasiliyevich Bondarenko was a Soviet fighter pilot and cosmonaut. He died during a training accident in Moscow, USSR, in 1961. A crater on the Moon's far side is named for him.-Education and military training:...

died in a training accident in 1961, the Soviet government airbrushed him out of photographs of the first group of cosmonauts. As Bondarenko had already appeared in publicly-available photographs, the deletions led to rumours of cosmonauts dying in failed launches. Both Bondarenko's existence and the nature of his death were secret until 1986.

Flag on the Reichstag

As Berlin fell in the closing days of the World War in Europe

European Theatre of World War II

The European Theatre of World War II was a huge area of heavy fighting across Europe from Germany's invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939 until the end of the war with the German unconditional surrender on May 8, 1945...

, moreover along the Eastern Front

Eastern Front (World War II)

The Eastern Front of World War II was a theatre of World War II between the European Axis powers and co-belligerent Finland against the Soviet Union, Poland, and some other Allies which encompassed Northern, Southern and Eastern Europe from 22 June 1941 to 9 May 1945...

), Red Army

Red Army

photographer

War photography

War photography captures photographs of armed conflict and life in war-torn areas.Although photographs can provide a more direct representation than paintings or drawings, they are sometimes manipulated, creating an image that is not objectively journalistic.-History:Photography, presented to the...

Yevgeny Khaldei

Yevgeny Khaldei was a Red Army photographer, best known for his World War II photograph of a Soviet soldier Raising a flag over the Reichstag, in Berlin, capital of the vanquished Nazi Germany .-Life:...

gathered some soldiers and posed a shot of them hoisting the flag (called the Victory Banner

Victory Banner

The Soviet Banner of Victory is the banner raised by the Red Army soldiers on the Reichstag building in Berlin, on April 30, 1945. It was raised by three Soviet soldiers: Alexei Berest, Mikhail Yegorov, and Meliton Kantaria, from Ukraine, Russia, and Georgia respectively.The Victory Banner, made...

) on the roof of the Reichstag building. The photo represented a historic moment, the defeat of Germany in a war that cost the Soviet Union tens of millions of lives.

After taking the symbolic photo, Khaldei quickly returned to Moscow

Moscow

. He further edited the image at the request of the editor-in-chief of the Ogonyok
Ogonyok
Ogoniok is one of the oldest weekly illustrated magazines in Russia, issued since . It was re-established in the Soviet Union in 1923 by Mikhail Koltsov....

, who noticed that Sen. Sgt. Abdulkhakim Ismailov

Abdulkhakim Ismailov

Abdulkhakim Ismailov was a Soviet soldier within the Soviet Union's Red Army during World War II. He was photographed by Yevgeny Khaldei raising the flag of the Soviet Union over the Reichstag in Berlin in May 1945, three days before Nazi Germany's surrender.Abdulkhakim Ismailov, a native of...

, who is supporting the flag-bearer in the photo, was wearing a watch on one of his wrists. On the other was an Adrianov compass

Adrianov compass

The Adrianov compass is a military compass designed by Russian Imperial Army topographist Vladimir Adrianov in 1907. Wrist-worn versions of the compass were then adopted and widely used by the Red and Soviet Army....

, which resembled another watch and one could infer that Ismailov had looted

Looting

Looting —also referred to as sacking, plundering, despoiling, despoliation, and pillaging—is the indiscriminate taking of goods by force as part of a military or political victory, or during a catastrophe, such as during war, natural disaster, or rioting...

the pieces or otherwise acquired them illegally. Although the practice of wearing both a compass and a watch was widespread in the Red Army, Khaldei, in order to avoid controversy, doctored the photo to remove the watch from Ismailov's right wrist. Khaldei also copied smoke in the background of another photo to make the scene more dramatic.

The photo was published 13 May 1945 in the Ogonyok
Ogonyok
Ogoniok is one of the oldest weekly illustrated magazines in Russia, issued since . It was re-established in the Soviet Union in 1923 by Mikhail Koltsov....

magazine. While many photographers took pictures of flags on the roof it was Khaldei's image that stuck.

The Water Commissar

Nikolai Yezhov

Lenin's Speech

Leon Trotsky

October Revolution celebration

Lev Kamenev

Postcard

Union of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class

Lost cosmonaut

Flag on the Reichstag

See also

Further reading