A telltale hat and a telltale leg
I once had a book of photographs, primarily from Russia and China, showing how people were removed from pictures when they were no longer "politically correct." Back in pre-PhotoShop days, students were amazed to see how Trotsky disappeared from revolutionary photos from Russia and how "the gang of four" vanished from photos of Mao's funeral.
I would pass this book around in class when students had read an excerpt from Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting about how Czech Communist official Victor Clementis lent his hat to leader Klement Gottwald on the day that they took over the government. Clementis was later purged and his picture was removed from historical photos of that day. His hat, though, remained on Gottwald's head, and some people remembered who had owned the hat. It was during discussions about this anecdote and the doctored photos that I'd offer the statement from Orwell's 1984, "Who controls the past, controls the future. Who controls the present, controls the past."
It seems that the manipulation of the past and the present is still going on. And sometimes the equivalent of Clementis' hat is left in the picture.
It Isn’t Magic: Putin Opponents Vanish From TV
"On a talk show last fall, a prominent political analyst named Mikhail G. Delyagin had some tart words about Vladimir V. Putin. When the program was later televised, Mr. Delyagin was not.
"Not only were his remarks cut — he was also digitally erased from the show, like a disgraced comrade airbrushed from an old Soviet photo. (The technicians may have worked a bit hastily, leaving his disembodied legs in one shot.)
"Mr. Delyagin, it turned out, has for some time resided on the so-called stop list, a roster of political opponents and other critics of the government who have been barred from TV news and political talk shows by the Kremlin...
"When some actors cracked a few mild jokes about Mr. Putin and Mr. Medvedev at Russia’s equivalent of the Academy Awards in March, they were expunged from the telecast...
"Senior government officials deny the existence of a stop list, saying that people hostile to the Kremlin do not appear on TV simply because their views are not newsworthy...
"After the Soviet Union’s fall, several national and regional networks arose that were owned by oligarchs. Though they operated with relatively few restrictions, their owners often used them to settle personal and business scores. One network, NTV, garnered attention for its investigative reporting and war dispatches from Chechnya.
"Mr. Putin chafed at negative coverage of the government, and the Kremlin effectively took over the major national networks in his first term, including NTV. Vladimir Gusinsky, NTV’s owner, was briefly arrested and then fled the country after giving up the network. From that point on, executives and journalists at Russian networks clearly understood that they would be punished for resisting the Kremlin.
"All the major national and regional networks are now owned by the government or its allies...
"A small national network, Ren TV, pushes the boundaries, as does a national radio station, the Echo of Moscow, which has become the voice of the opposition even though Gazprom, the government gas monopoly, owns a majority stake in it.
"The Kremlin seems to tolerate criticism in such outlets because they have a limited reach compared with the major television networks..."
appearances on Russian TV. Now he’s lucky
if he gets his leg in the picture (that’s
it in the bottom left corner of the right
hand picture).
posted by Ken Wedding @ 9:17 AM
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