Now you see him—now you don’t. Compare a photo taken in the 1930s of five Communist Party officials in the USSR and you’ll see Avel Enukidze, photographed next to Soviet premier Vyacheslav Molotov and others. But during Josef Stalin’s Great Purge, the one-time member of the Communist party’s highest governing body was deemed an enemy of the state and executed by firing squad.
Then, he disappeared from Soviet photographs, too, his existence blotted out by a retouched suit on another official from the original photo.
Enukidze’s erasure was the product of a real conspiracy to change public perception in the
