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

About this book

A New York Times Notable Book 1997 The lavishly illustrated and often darkly hilarious retelling of Soviet history through the doctored photographs under Stalin. The Commissar Vanishes has been hailed as a brilliant indispensable record of an era. The Commissar Vanishes offers a unique and chilling look at how one man--Joseph Stalin--manipulated the science of photography to advance his own political career and erase the memory of his victims. Over the past thirty years David King has assembled the worlds largest archive of doctored Soviet photographs the best of which appear here in a book Tatyana Tolstaya in The New York Review of Books called "an extraordinary incomparable volume."