“The Commissar Vanishes,” a study in photographs, showcases the disappearance of the physical record of Trotsky and a number of other Russians who fell out of favor, and out of history, during the Stalin era.
How unreal can things get? As the sense of shared reality is eroded, more with each passing day, one wonders. Writing onin this magazine, fifty-one years ago, Hannah Arendt noted just how vulnerable factual truth is, using the example of “the role during the Russian Revolution of a man by the name of Trotsky, who appears in none of the Soviet Russian history books.
There is so much more that we don’t know about Stalinist terror—we are no closer today to knowing how many people were killed than we were one, two, or five decades ago. Earlier this month,that the F.S.B., the successor agency to the K.G.B., is destroying secret-police records from the terror era; that means that we are unlikely ever to form a significantly more complete picture than the one we have now.
Vladimir Lenin speaking in Moscow to Red Army soldiers departing for the Polish front, in 1920. Leon Trotsky and Lev Borisovich Kamenev, behind, are on the steps to the right.Leon Trotsky and Lev Borisovich Kamenev have been airbrushed out of an image of the same scene.Compared to the intentional, crude, and pervasive altering of the Soviet record, the lying currently prevalent in American politics is amateur hour, if not exactly child’s play.
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