With or Without You

I chose this pair of pictures which exhibit the amazing disappearing Leon Trotsky because of its political and historical poignancy. Trotsky was a key figure in the Russian Communist Revolution of 1917, second only to Vladimir Lenin, and founder and commander of the Red Army. In the 1920s, however, Trotsky became an outspoken opponent of Josef Stalin's increasingly bureaucratic brand of totalitarian Communism (as opposed to the less bureaucratic Marxist-Leninist brand of totalitarian Communism). He was exiled from the Soviet Union at the end of that decade, and was later assassinated by a Soviet agent in Mexico.

In the photo on the left, Trotsky is seen hobnobbing with other Soviet officials. In the picture on the right, Trotsky is not seen hobnobbing with other Soviet officials, probably because he isn't seen at all. This type of photo manipulation was an extremely common practice in Stalin's workers' paradise. When anyone crossed Stalin, they were either killed or sent to work camps/prisons known as gulags (where they died gradually by intense labor and malnutrition instead of by a bullet to the back of the head). But Stalin was a thorough man--when you were gone, you were way gone. It was as if you never existed. Stalin killed countless officials, Party members, friends, and even family members, but he didn't stop there. Anyone known to the public, especially known to have been in his good graces, was erased from photographs as well as documents, books, news archives, or anything else that mentioned them at all. His enemies were not just removed from this world, but from history altogether, especially if they were once his allies.

Of course, this manipulation is harmful. To deny any relationship with a man who was instrumental in your rise to power (ahem, Barrack Obama, ahem) is to not only dangerously distort history, but to cause a massive cognitive dissonance on the society as a whole. George Orwell brilliantly demonstrates this in 1984: the ever-present socialist regime would not only reverse its positions and claim that the current position was the position it had held all along (ahem, Barrack Obama, ahem), it would claims things that the people could plainly see were not true. Doing this repeatedly caused the aforementioned cognitive dissonance, both in 1984 and in the all-too-real Soviet Union, subjecting those trapped behind the Iron Curtain to a sort of nationwide psychological trauma by creating massive disconnect with reality.