✨ Featured Offer
Used, Very Good
$28.64
List Price: $35.00
🚚
See all 5 offers from $28.12 FREE standard delivery by: 30 Mar 2026
Overview
"The Commissar Vanishes offers a chilling look at how one man - Joseph Stalin - manipulated the science of photography to advance his own political career and to erase the memory of his victims. On Stalin's orders, purged rivals were airbrushed from group portraits, and crowd scenes were altered to depict even greater legions of the faithful. In one famous image, several Party members disappeared from an official photograph, to be replaced by a sylvan glade." "For the past three decades, author and photohistorian David King has assembled the world's largest archive of photographs, posters, and paintings from the Soviet era. His collection has grown to more than a quarter of a million images, the best of which have been selected for The Commissar Vanishes." "The efforts of the Kremlin airbrushers were often unintentionally hilarious. A 1919 photograph showing a large crowd of Bolsheviks clustered around Lenin, for example, became, with the aid of the retoucher, an intimate portrait of Lenin and Stalin sitting alone, and then, in a later version, of Stalin by himself." "The Commissar Vanishes is nothing less than the history of the Soviet Union, as retold through falsified images, many of them published here for the first time outside Russia. In each case, the juxtaposition of the original and the doctored images yields a terrifying - and often tragically funny - insight into one of the darkest chapters of modern history."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
| ISBN-13 | 9780805052947 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10 | 0805052941 |
| Weight | 0.70 Pounds |
| Dimensions | 9.75 x 0.75 x 11.75 In |
| List Price | $35.00 |
| Edition | 1st Edition |
| Format | Hardcover |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Pages | 192 pages |
| Publisher | Metropolitan Books |
| Published On | 1997-10-15 |
View All Offers
Sort by:
Price
Condition
Seller
Seller Comments
Price
Used, Good
Seller details
Evergreen Goodwill
Seattle, WA, USA
Free delivery by: 30 Mar 2026
✨ Used, Very Good
Seller details
HPB-Diamond
Dallas, TX, USA
Connecting readers with great books since 1972! Used books may not include companion materials, and ...
Free delivery by: 30 Mar 2026
Used, Good
Seller details
Wonder Book - Member ABAA/ILAB
Frederick, MD, USA
Good condition. Good dust jacket. A copy that has been read but remains intact. May contain markin...
Free delivery by: 30 Mar 2026
Used, Good
Seller details
Goodwill of Silicon Valley
San Jose, CA, USA
Supports Goodwill of Silicon Valley job training programs. The cover and pages are in Good conditi...
Free delivery by: 30 Mar 2026
Used, Good
Seller details
Oddball Books
Burbank, CA, USA
Folio-over 12-15" tall. 1st Printing. The spine is broken along the second page and the previous ow...
Free delivery by: 30 Mar 2026