[MUSIC]. Welcome to topic 3 of The Camera Never Lies, and in this weeks material, we're going to deal with a phrase I've used before, the cause celebre, of manipulation of images in history, the airbrushing of history Stalin, and falsification. And to a certain degree, the motivation of presenting these sort of images and this dialogue academically to students, came from a knowledge of what Stalin had done during the 1930s and the 1940s to change the historical record through manipulation of images. Now, a couple of weeks ago, at Royal Holloway, Dr Jonathan Waterlow. From New College, Oxford, presented a paper on, No Laughing Matter, Popular Humor and Soviet Society in Stalin's 1930s. Now, I will put the podcast link of that particular seminar up for you to listen to. It's more background than anything else, but deals with an issue that you might not. Readily think of. one of the most horrible periods in Russian and Soviet History and Dr Waterlow's research is looking at how the population of the time coped. Now he tells a story from that particular era of a child with a catapult. using the photograph of one of the high upper apparatchiks in Politic Bureau as a target, and the child was told off and saying you, you know that this is punishable this is showing disrespect to the state. And the child says, what does it matter? He's a hero now. He will be an enemy soon. So, one of the things that Doctor Waterlow picked up on very much, is the degree to which those in favor fell out of favor very rapidly. And to a certain extent. the de-, the knowledge of the population that that was what was happening. The 1930s was a period of purges within the Soviet Union and during that time Stalin managed to remove many of his previous allies and co-leaders within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Now that was quote common knowledge unquote. But, the fact that people who would disappear during the 1930s. literally either publicly executed or removed from the homes is one thing. But the fact that Stalin felt the need to remove them from the historical record, I think is quite a telling point. So what we're going to do today is go through a potted history of Stalin's leadership from the mid 1920s through to his death in 1953. To talk a little bit about the Soviet Union under Stalin, to think about how image was used as propaganda. by the, Soviet Union. And particularly we're going to be focusing on the archival work of David King. some of these images are available online, some of them are available via print. the principal book that we're going to be using. The Commissar Vanishes the fortification of photographs and art in Stalin's Russia. Unfortunately, it's out of print at present but at least on the screens I'll be able to give you one or two of images and show you some of the comparisons from David King's very painstaking work. Going back through the archive. we're going to actually think about what this means, we, we've talked about falsification in the earlier lectures, but here is the prime example of history being rewritten within the life of a leader. And I'd just like us to take a step back and reflect on a, why its took place? B, a point i've raise before,if it was so obvious and so common place ,why was it done, and c, thinking about what that tells about service society of the major leadership of the time In the context of the historical record. So the main focus around this particular class is to talk about what happens in a societies where there is high degree of central control. Where you have one individual with an enormous degree of power. And how challenging that power can be difficult. difficult to the point of losing ones life. So, given that how do we actually move forward and discuss this in a considered manner. Now, from this beginning and this consideration of Stalin, I'd like to just think about how the concept of airbrushing someone out of history has been extended more widely as a phrase in common usage. Now while George Orwell's 1984 was actually written about Britain in 1948 a minor play on numbers if not words in the title. one of the things that is quite prominent in that particular novel is the ministry of truth. reediting the past. if you like amending previous newspaper reports so they fit in line with current policy current events and if you like they are retrospectively changing the continuity the that the Americans are now is retconning. So there is an element to which that Stalin's practices were cruelly parodied in the way that George Orwell wrote 1984 in, in this particular respect. And we have instances in the relatively recent past The Guardian, I think in New Year's Eve of. 2011 ran a line a by-line, suggesting that coming up to the centenary of the African National Congress, that the centrality of the role of the ANC in the struggle against the role of apartheid in South Africa Was being overplayed to, to a degree. And there were accusations that the Reverend Desmond Tutu, Archbishop of Cape Town his role was being played down. So while it is figurative role and literal a number of people were actually making the point that he have an issue of the airbrushing of Desmond Tutu out of the historical record. So, it's fallen into a much broader parlance than simply dealing with photographs. So that's one of the reasons I want to deal with the Stalinist issue, because it has currency beyond purely what happened in the 1930s and the 1940s.
