David King: Red Star over Russia

The New Criterion, March 1, 2010

To be asked to pick the best book that you have read in the past year is usually an invitation to equivocation, but that was not the case on one evening in the late 1990s when my interrogator—and that’s the word—was the Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven. “Well,” I replied, “The Commissar Vanishes.”

She hadn’t heard of it. Good. Liked the book’s concept. Better. Told an aide to write down the title. Better still. Didn’t know that it was written by an unreconstructed lefty. Ah, just as well.

David King’s The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia (1997) remains one of the finest and most unusual pieces of Sovietology ever produced. To start with, it is based on photographs, posters, and illustrations drawn from its author’s massive 250,000-piece collection of images relating to Russia, the former Soviet Union and “Communist movements everywhere,” a unique resource that King has been assembling for decades. This reddest of hoards is a monument to King’s political leanings—he has published more than is entirely healthy on the topic of Leon Trotsky—but, thanks to its range, it has ended up as something far grander than that. The same might be said of The Commissar Vanishes. Inspired by the way in which the Soviets wrote Trotsky out of history, King’s command of his material transforms what might have been a mildly interesting Fourth Internationalist lament into a startlingly original evisceration of the Stalinist method.

Specifically, the book revolves around the way that images and, in particular, photographs were repeatedly chopped, changed, juggled, retouched, altered, and manipulated by a regime determined to remove inconvenient traces of inconvenient people from the historical record. Execution was not enough. The lives that had gone before that concluding bullet in the skull had to be retrospectively reshaped to fit Stalin’s Procrustean view of how the Soviet story should be told.

It was a campaign that recognized no distinction between public and private, and it was a campaign that nobody could safely ignore. King highlights the precision with which the famous artist and photographer Alexander Rodchenko inked out the faces of the purged from his personal copy of a book he had himself produced. Blackly blank-faced, these remnants, these apparitions, these Banquos at the apparatchiks’ dangerous feast, linger on the page alongside those still in favor, a warning, a reproach, an act of insurance. As the countless scribblings over, hacked-out heads, and other precautionary mutilations of books from this era bear witness, such ad hoc self-censorship was commonplace, if too crude and small-scale for the needs of a modern totalitarian state. To fill that gap, specialists emerged, dedicated to the wholesale reengineering of history into a malleable, constantly reedited narrative.

But it was not enough to lie about the past. Those lies had to work. They had to be buttressed and reinforced. They had to be illustrated. In one characteristic sequence, King shows how Trotsky, the commissar of King’s tellingly elegiac title, was among those subsequently “vanished” from a frequently published photograph of the second anniversary of the October revolution. With tinkering such as this, history could be continuously (the party line was always changing) reshaped, reinvented, and manufactured in a process only occasionally—and incompletely—redeemed by the archetypically Soviet slovenliness of those who sliced and diced their way through the past but sometimes allowed the faintest suggestion of the truth to slip through. In another photograph of those same celebrations republished in 1987, most of Trotsky has been edited out, but his elbow survives, unexplained, unidentified, somebody’s elbow, nobody’s elbow.

As an explanation of history through its manipulation, The Commissar Vanishes is a technical tour de force. As an examination of the wider pathologies of the Stalinist state it is a masterpiece. It was followed by Ordinary Citizens: The Victims of Stalin (2003), a collection of over a hundred mugshots from the NKVD/KGB archives, glimpses of the doomed hours or days from their annihilation.

Compared with the narrower focus of those two earlier works, Red Star over Russia is an unruly sprawling epic, “a fast-forward visual history of the Soviet Union” from 1917 until just after the death of Stalin. Based again on King’s archive, this book is another extraordinary creation, but to understand it properly it helps to look at the reasons King gives for concluding his narrative when he does:

The subsequent “period of stagnation”, when Leonid Brezhnev was in charge, was generally as dull and sluggish on the visual front as it was politically, and for this reason has been left out. So too have the final years of collapse under Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin.”

Perhaps the perestroika era was omitted because the break in the narrative would have been too tricky to manage. Perhaps. Given his ideological orientation, it is difficult to avoid the suspicion that King might have found this terminal renunciation of 1917’s once radiant future just too awful a development to contemplate. That said, his assertion that it was largely aesthetic considerations that led him to pass over the stodgy Brezhnev era rings true. As the art editor of the London Sunday Times’s magazine between 1965–75, he was at the helm during the magazine’s creative zenith, a time when its striking layout was, none too coincidentally, often highly suggestive of the early Soviet and pre-Soviet avant-garde, an approach successfully repeated in Red Star over Russia.

King has a good eye and a Fleet Street–sharpened sense of how to lure the reader in. Red Star over Russia’s cover is of a dramatically charging Red cavalryman, designed in civil war–era Kiev but anticipating Roy Lichtenstein by four decades. Meanwhile the beautiful Tamara Litsinskaya graces the cover of Ordinary Citizens. Pause for a moment to remember her: she was twenty-seven years old, “non-party,” and, on August 25, 1937, she was shot. Inevitably, there is the suspicion that King’s pursuit of the aesthetically (and commercially) effective could tempt him to ignore other, higher, considerations. A mugshot is not a pin-up. Then again, human nature is what is. To the observer—and that’s what buying Ordinary Citizens makes us—the loveliness of this young woman only adds to the poignancy to us of her terrible fate, and thus to the power of King’s message. Now we will remember Tamara Litsinskaya. And so we should.

To take another example of how the search for the right image risks clashing with the dictates of good taste, consider the inclusion in Red Star over Russia of the best-known of Dmitri Baltermans’s photographs of peasant women grieving over the victims of a Nazi massacre near Kerch. It is one of the greatest war photographs ever taken. It helped define the conflict for many Soviets. It belongs in the book. Nevertheless, thanks to the passing of time and to Red Star over Russia’s superior production values, Baltermans’s bleak, unforgivably beautiful image also becomes an objet d’art, glossily packaged for our contemplation, but increasingly disconnected from the tragedy it records. More troublingly still, the relatively poorly and rarely photographed Holodomor (1932–3), the genocidal man-made famine in which as many as seven million Ukrainians may have died, merits just one small photo, a snapshot really. Seven million dead. One photograph.

Red Star over Russia is also a volume that, however inadvertently (it was clearly not King’s intent), forces its readers to ponder their reaction to beauty deployed in the service of evil. That’s a topic that can generate a safely academic debate when it comes, say, to the artistic qualities of artifacts used by the Aztecs in their rites of human sacrifice. It becomes rather less comfortable the closer we come to our own time. Too often the response is denial or evasion. The Nazis never produced anything of aesthetic interest. The creative successes of Fascist Italy were always a despite, never a because. The artistic explosion of the early Soviet era was a gorgeous false dawn, tragic symbol of the nascent Utopia that Stalin cut down. None of these claims is true.

So far as the best of that Soviet art is concerned, the extent of its creators’ achievement should be acknowledged—many of the works reproduced by King are first rate—but so should the fact that this was art knowingly put at the disposal of a regime set on mass murder from the very beginning. That’s an ugliness King is unwilling to confront, quite possibly because this long-time admirer of Trotsky retains some allegiance to the conceit of the Revolution Betrayed, and thus to the assertion (to use a polite word) that the Bolshevik experiment was a glorious dream that went astray—an assertion that would, had it any connection with reality, do much to get many of the regime’s early cheerleaders off the moral hook.

It’s an attitude that can also be detected in King’s handling of some of the mugshots included in Red Star over Russia: those of the defendants in the first and second great Moscow show trials of the late 1930s. To be left unmoved by these portraits (and they are portraits—the NKVD used natural light, eliminating the frozen artificiality of the flashbulb photo) of these broken, terrified, furious, stunned individuals would be monstrous. At the same time, it’s impossible not to wonder over what horrors these members of the old Bolshevik elite had themselves presided. King never tells us. It’s perhaps no less significant that while King puts together a vivid indictment of the Stalin regime, most of the images he deploys to illustrate the early years of the revolution (with the exception of some harrowing photographs of the Volga famine of 1920–1) convey a sense of dynamism, of progress on the move. Where atrocity is depicted, it is only obliquely, in a few posters and in a civil war photograph of captured Red Army soldiers held, naturally, on a White “death ship.” To be sure the Whites frequently reverted to a near-primeval savagery in their fight against Bolshevism, but of the almost unimaginable, almost ecstatic cruelty unleashed on Russia by the revolutionaries we are shown nothing.

For all that, no page of Red Star over Russia is wasted: there is enough in this book to sustain more than one interpretation both of the revolution and of what it became. Many of the images, most notably the reproductions and photographs of the regime’s initially utopian, increasingly deranged, and ultimately surreal iconography, can, if read properly, be used to help pinpoint Communism for the millennial cult that it really was. At its core, there was nothing progressive about it. I doubt that King would agree with this diagnosis. He concludes Red Star over Russia with the snide observation that the fall of the Soviet Union brought “a united sigh of relief” to “the capitalists of the world.” The liberation, however imperfect, of tens of millions of ordinary citizens by that collapse doesn’t rate a mention. Some people never learn. Faith can be like that.