{"id":1589,"date":"2026-02-02T16:06:30","date_gmt":"2026-02-02T16:06:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/verge\/?p=1589"},"modified":"2026-02-02T16:09:50","modified_gmt":"2026-02-02T16:09:50","slug":"unpersons-and-untruth-reality-photography-and-the-manipulation-of-stalinism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/verge\/18\/unpersons-and-untruth-reality-photography-and-the-manipulation-of-stalinism\/","title":{"rendered":"Unpersons and Untruth: Reality, Photography, and the Manipulation of Stalinism"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>by Reese Finnigan<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>From the author:\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">During Stalin\u2019s rule, the Soviet state, in pursuit of its own survival, sought total control over the lives of its citizens. Many of the methods of pursuing this control have been well explored, particularly the violent repression of any real or perceived dissent. More insidious, however, was the state\u2019s attempts at control through the rewriting of reality. Under Stalinism, thousands of photographs were manipulated, defaced, or partially destroyed, both by the state, and by civilians themselves. Doing so was an act of survival for both parties, but it also contributed to a reality crisis within the USSR. Photographic collections in archives today contain a number of images of denounced individuals who have been painstakingly, fearfully removed from portraits. On their own, these images reveal a society that was in constant paranoia about the presence of certain individuals in photographs. When examined as a pattern, these manipulated photographs suggest that the existence of Stalin\u2019s regime hinged on a contorted relationship to reality itself. This article, based on a larger undergraduate thesis, argues that the practice of manipulating and defacing photos was part of a cycle of performance between the state and the people. Through this cycle, multiple, contradictory, simultaneous realities were created, and upheld, by both sides. Understanding this contorted reality is key to understanding what existence was like during Stalinism.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Read: <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/verge\/files\/2026\/02\/FIN_HIS001_25.pdf\">Unpersons and Untruth: Reality, Photography, and the Manipulation of Stalinism (PDF)<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Copyrights of all Verge articles and editorial material belong to the authors.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;Defaced images like the ones explored above suggest that at the very heart of Stalinism was a contorted relationship to reality. This was not something on the fringes of the way the state ran, or the way the people experienced the Soviet Union. Survival in Stalin\u2019s regime hinged on the existence of multiple, contradictory, simultaneous realities.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[54552],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1589","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-54552"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/verge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1589","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/verge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/verge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/verge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/verge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1589"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/verge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1589\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1593,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/verge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1589\/revisions\/1593"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/verge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1589"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/verge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1589"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/verge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}