Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin secretly employed a team of photo retouchers to physically airbrush his political enemies out of historical photographs after he had them executed.

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Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin secretly employed a team of photo retouchers to physically airbrush his political enemies out of historical photographs after he had them executed. Long before Photoshop existed, these artists painstakingly painted over the faces of former allies, turning them into bushes, innocent bystanders, or empty chairs to rewrite the visual history of the Soviet Union. Whenever a high-ranking official fell out of favor and got a bullet to the back of the head, they also ceased to exist in the national archives. Stalin essentially invented the concept of violently un-tagging your former friends from group photos, taking petty social media blocking to a homicidal extreme