The Commissar Vanishes

Courtesy of our good chum Randy comes this absolutely chilling photo gallery of manipulated images from Soviet Russia.

The images above illustrate the constant requirement for the Soviet Union to erase people from history depending on their future acts:

Stalin's bloody reign is not without certain irony. Nikolai Yezhov, the young man strolling with Stalin [right], is shot in 1940. It seems only fitting that when Yezhov is removed from the photograph he is replaced by the waters of the Moscow-Volga Canal [left]. Yezhov was commissar of water transport.

You know, it's stuff like this that really causes me to get infuriated when people compare the Bush administration to Big Brother in 1984. If I want to stand up here and call any U.S. politician a murderous fucker, I can do that. Anyone at Wired can do that. We don't risk our families being shot or our existence being airbrushed out of history. We should always be careful to be aware of how quickly freedom can become tyranny, but over-exaggerating the problem is just an insult to the people who have died in the past.

The Commissar Vanishes [Newseum.org]