Appearance masked disappearance and death in Stalin’s Soviet Union. Nothing was how it seemed. Nigel Fountain reports on the photos that hid dirty deeds
One photograph in The Commissar Vanishes is of two men playing chess in the sunshine of Capri. It is April 1908. Alexander Bogdanov, later to found the Soviet Union’s first blood transfusion clinic, is assessing the state of play.
Bogdanov – who had the good sense to die during an experiment on himself in 1928 – was winning against his bowler-hatted opponent, Vladimir Ilich Lenin. The image is not destined to remain in 1908. Later it will be wrenched from its time, to become the scene of a crime, evidence of a long-forgotten murder, barometer of changing political weather.
The subtitle of The Commissar Vanishes is The Falsification Of Photographs And Art In Stalin’s Russia – a place where nothing was what it seemed; a place where reality was reshaped by thousands of unseen hands.
In 1908, in Capri, there were five fully visible witnesses to Lenin’s lost chess game. One of them, Vladimir Bazarov, a distinguished, bearded man, hands on lapels, was shot on Josef Stalin’s orders in 1937. Two years after his death, Bazarov was airbrushed out of the photograph. So too was Zinovi Peshkov, brother of Yakov Sverdlov, the first head of the Bolshevik state. Peshkov was luckier, he emigrated to France, becoming a French World War I officer, then a military adviser in Thirties China, a wartime Gaullist, and later a French secret serviceman. He died in 1966.
David King, the book’s author, elaborates: “He was in London during the war. Free French. He probably drank in the French pub in Soho.” We laughed. King laughs a lot. This morning we looking at hundreds of images of madness and mass murder, images that fuse into black farce.
By the Sixties the unseen hands were back in Capri. Peshkov had returned to the photograph, together with a woman’s knee, absent for half a century; but Bazarov, one of the millions lost in Stalin’s darkness, remained an absentee. In those more liberal times his space had been filled – by the faint outline of a Grecian pillar.
Amid the catalogue of staggering images in The Commissar Vanishes, I cannot erase two mugshots of Isaak Babel, author of Odessa Tales and Red Cavalry. They were taken immediately after the great writer’s arrest and confinement in May 1939 in the Lubyanka. He is almost expressionless, slightly bewildered, but seems to be staring just beyond the camera, composing a chronicle of his death foretold. It was indeed to follow eight months later. I mention his expression to King. “He was near-sighted,” he says. “That is why he looks like that. The first thing they did was smash his glasses. Then they took the photographs.”
An exhibition based on The Commissar Vanishes opens in Vienna this month. “An outfit in Berlin saw the point of the book,” says King. “They got very excited and organised the tour.” The exhibition goes on to Berlin, Mannheim, Bilbao, Turin and Milan. To sell the original book, King went to 12 London publishers. It was very interesting and great, but photo-books don’t sell, and anyway Russia isn’t news any more …
So in the middle of the night in the bar at the Chelsea Hotel, Manhattan, King finally clinched a deal with Metropolitan Books, which later sold it on to Canongate. It was reprinted within a week of publication, having sold 20 000 copies.
But it is visual history, not a photo-book. It’s glossy, but it isn’t a coffee-table volume. It had to be well-printed to reveal the detail. The murders, the exclusions, the mystery, the devil is in the detail. There is the work of thousands of retouchers, wielding poison pens, scalpels, airbrushes, concealing crimes and betrayal, on pain of death to conceal the pain of death.
“I am not interested in the photography,” says King. “I am interested in the people in front of the camera and what happened to them.”
Since the Sixties, King has been one of British journalism’s great designers. While he was art editor of the Sunday Times Magazine in the early Seventies, he began searching the Moscow archives for photographs of Leon Trotsky, murdered on Stalin’s orders in Mexico in 1940. Trotsky, founder of the Red Army, and number two to Lenin in the Revolution wasn’t there. “They had completely wiped him out. It was at this moment that I determined to start my collection,” says King. His now probably the world’s biggest private archive of 20th-century Russian images.
The new book is the archive’s latest child. On one side are the official images, continuously refocused, cropped, adjusted as Stalin sought to re-invent the past, rig the future. “Go into any Moscow bookshop,” says King, “and look at the pictures in the books. They have either been retouched, or pages have been ripped out, or attacked with knives.”
Then there are the original photographs, fleeting scenes, moments of truth, culled from junk shops in Amsterdam and St Petersburg, Moscow and Berlin, book markets, from King’s friends around the world, from old reds. There were parcels from Budapest and New York, a souvenir portfolio from the 1921 Comintern Congress brought back by its Dutch delegate, material hidden under Russian floorboards for most of the century as a private act of rebellion.
Thus is the dialectic between socialism and Stalinism, reality and myth traced across the decades. Crowds, arguments, disorder, return to a place that Stalin had peopled with effigies, icons, and zombies; a wasteland that has persisted into the era of Boris Yeltsin, the latest ruler created and shaped by Stalinism.
“When I showed the book to Russians,” King says, “the picture that stopped them was the one of Lenin and [Maksim] Gorky.” It was one of the most famous, pervasive of Stalinist images. The novelist was standing behind the revolutionary, art and action unified, a trailer for Stalin’s later manipulation of Gorky, for his own joint photo-calls.
The photograph that King had pulled out for the Russians was the original, which he found in a Dutch bookshop. There are not two men but 26, and three women, standing on the steps of Petrograd’s Uritsky Palace at the Second Comintern Congress in 1920. Revolutionaries who were to get away, revolutionaries who were to be murdered.
“They are dumbstruck by the original,” King said. “They look at it, they look at me, quizzically. I can see them thinking, `Did he do this. Has he added all these people in?'”
Thus did a society dedicated to, and decorated by, socialist realism suffuse itself with surrealism. Consider, for example, Klutsis’s 1935 Happy Socialist Land poster with its dream- bombers spelling out Stalin’s name under blue Moscow skies. Even more striking is his Red Army photomontage, which became a victim of another of Stalin’s byzantine intrigues. The images of two Soviet marshals were ripped out by the artist, since after Tukhachevsky and Gamarnik’s arrest – and subsequent murder – their presence would invoke the most lethal form of art criticism.
Terror also precipitated a shape of art to come. The 1920s avant-garde designer Rodchenko died in 1956, and 28 years later, King visited his almost undisturbed Moscow studio. There he unearthed a splendidly produced 1934 hagiography, Ten Years In Uzbekistan, designed by Rodchenko, complete with pictures of local party leaders, most of whom Stalin purged in 1937.
To possess images of non-people, such as sometime secret police boss Yakov Peters, was to court death. So the Russian had kept the book and obliterated image after image with Indian ink. We stare at what was left of Peters, a black blob floating in photographic shadow. “In some peculiar way,” observes King, “you’re looking at something which has become a [Mark] Rothko.” Mid-Fifties paintings of the American-Lithuanian Rothko radiate light. The page emanates darkness.
On page 121 of The Commissar Vanishes is a 1934 photograph of the 228 bureaucrats who worked with prosecutor general Andrei Vyshinsky, processing mass slaughter and deportation. King bought the picture, which he saw hanging on the wall of a Moscow antique shop.
Was it difficult to get, I ask. No, he replies, they thought he was mad. After all, who wants such photographs now? He paid 500 roubles. Vyshinsky, in the front row, is hunched, hands on his knees, surrounded by the faces people saw when the cell doors slammed. Pretty well everyone looks at the camera apart from Vyshinsky, the murder of a world comfortably on his shoulders, whose eyes are downcast.
Only one other photograph of Vyshinsky matches its impact. This is a 1922 group portrait crowded with the members of the all-Russian central committee. It was taken just 18 months after Vyshinsky abandoned the Mensheviks for the Bolsheviks. Lenin, Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev smile, vaguely. Vyshinsky stares at the lens. At Stalin’s behest he will have most of the people in the shot murdered. Christ, I say to King, look at those psycho staring eyes.
“No,” says King. “He’s bang in the centre of the flash. And it’s cropped, part of a much bigger picture.”