Stalin not only killed people, but also erased them from history. Specifically, from the photos. Why did he do that, how did he do it and in what cases did it happen?
When in ancient Rome you wanted to eradicate the memory of a person who was considered an enemy of the state, everything that referred to the convict was eliminated – images, monuments, inscriptions. This has been called – a posteriori, as Edgar Straehle warns – damnatio memoriae.
Different types of damnatio memoriae have been practiced by countless peoples since ancient times, such as the Hittites, Babylonians or Egyptians.
For example, the references that Titus Livius makes in his Ab Urbe Condita to the iconoclasm of the Athenians about the statues, portraits and inscriptions of Philip of Macedon are striking. And even more so, the various forms of “memory judgment” that their fellow citizens practiced with those whose disastrous actions made them worthy of dissipating all physical traces of their journey through the world, is an earlier step toward letting their memories get lost in the mist. of the time.
The management of the collective memory, at least in that part that has to do with the relationship between past and present, has always seduced those in power.
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Some, such as Cleisthenes, the great Athenian legislator, in their desire to build a new state based on the equality of citizens before the law, would act out of a plausible desire to erase all traces of oligarchs or tyrants. . In fact, there is no shortage of people suggesting that the damnatio memoriae was also a way of drawing attention – to evoke the past from the present, we would say today – about disastrous or odious actions that should not be forgotten. So the destruction of the remnants of that past would also fulfill a prophylactic and educational mission, and this can only be effective if it becomes visible.
This double reading explains why there is no consensus when it comes to considering, as Enzo Traverso suggests without going any further, that the removal of certain characters from official Soviet images under Stalinism is another form of
damnatio memoriae
In the original photo, from left to right, Nikolai Antipov (former People’s Commissar for Posts and Telegraphs of the USSR), Joseph Stalin, Sergei Kirov and Nikolai Shvernik. Each of the members in the original photo was removed when they fell out of favor. Wikimedia Commons
Charles W. Hedrick, for example, rejects such an association and underscores the different goals pursued by both practices in the Roman world and in the Soviet Union, emphasizing, for example, the selective forgetting and remembering of VN Flavian’s actions by Roman elites. .
The truth, however, is that such purposes did not have to be identical within the same culture, nor did the times or contexts. Sometimes the search for the legitimacy of the new ruler predominated; in others the public and private were mixed, as then the underlying power conflict was between different families; in others, finally, the desire to appropriate the achievements of the predecessor.
Nor, as Hedrick himself suggests, can the resources available to the Roman state compare to those of a totalitarian regime like the Soviet: they were very limited when it came to guaranteeing the effectiveness of the “memory sentence” in the first case, and of a much greater amplitude in its effects in the second. The difference in aims and means constitutes, in my view, the two essential elements that we must emphasize in interpreting the peculiar damnatio memoriae of Stalinism, which are reflected in the hundreds of images collected and analyzed by David King.
To begin with, it would be necessary to distinguish between photographic manipulation aimed at conveying a more presentable picture of the leader or the regime’s achievements and that which really wanted to erase from history those who made them uncomfortable. Hiding the wrinkles of Iósif Stalin or softening his stern expression, as well as hiding the dirt on the streets, walls or buildings that surrounded the leaders in their pose, seems to go no further than a political marketing operation.
But even in their smallest aspects, these actions were part of a much larger and fanatical program: the “cult of personality,” denounced by Nikita Khrushchev in his famous speech at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party.
Stalin’s obsession with making the image of Leon Trotsky disappear from many photographs is explained by the political and ideological confrontation they had in their struggle for power, which would eventually lead to exile and death.
Not much different was what happened to Lev Kamenev, his first ally in his confrontation with Trotsky, but who had already come in December 1925 to publicly demand Stalin’s resignation from the post of general secretary. Eleven years later, as part of the “Great Purge”, which began in December 1934, Kamenev would be executed and his image would be removed with a scalpel and an airbrush from the famous photo in which he shared the stage with a jubilant Lenin in his speech to the troops leaving for the Polish front.
Yezhov, the People’s Commissar of the Interior who had led the great purges of the 1930s, eventually became another victim of theirs when his anger became uncomfortable for the leader and, consequently, a non-recommended companion in the well-known image of him being seen while he walks with Stalin and Molotov on the occasion of the construction of the Volga Canal.
Many others, such as Alexander Malchenko, Isaac Zelensky, Grigori Zinoviev, Nikolai Bukharin, Karl Radek, Nikolai Antipov, Sergei Kirov or Nikolai Shvernik, “disappeared” for the same or similar reasons.
At higher levels of autocracy, the despot is more tempted to apply the “memory phrase” to those who are perceived as a threat at any given time. Sometimes, even after they are killed, because the mere evocation of the executed person can undermine the idolatry towards the leader.
Perhaps that is why it is customary to bring up the parallels between the reality that George Orwell envisioned in his dystopian 1984 and Stalin’s Soviet Union. And so it is useful to stay alert, both today and yesterday, against the aspiring officials of the “Ministry of Truth” tasked with revising history and eliminating those who have fallen into disgrace.
This article was published in ‘The conversation
Source: La Verdad
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