is this just atrocity propaganda, or was stalin actually a mass murderer? deleting someone from a photograph is not a good sign.
Could be explained in many ways, the easiest would be whoever scanned the photos into a digital format reworked them… add some exposure on the “after” picture and make the Soviets look scary lol. Or anyone after that, really.
I also have to ask, was it necessary for the editors to bring up exposure on the original picture? Looking at other photo work it doesn’t seem like it was (Soviets were very good at it and were far from the only ones doing it).
The overexposed picture is the only one I can find, except for that one on Radio Liberty of all places, which looks completely repainted:
As none of the websites where I found those pictures say where they found them, who took them, who digitalised them… any guess is as good as any as to why they look different. And if we look at this crispy “before” picture, you can see weird artefacts around Yezhov, like he emits an aura:
In that last picture you see the same artefacts around Stalin as well, and around every single one of the individuals here if you look closely. Like, look at all their shoulders, they all have the same “aura”. You want to say that they were bluescreening? Make sure that you don’t see what you want to see. I can’t find a single claim that such erasures did not happen.
