David King, a famous British collector, photographer and designer, conducts a unique research — he is tracing the Soviet leaders and activists who vanished from the images published in Stalin's Russia. This is the subject matter of his world's famous exhibition The Commissar Vanishes. The history of Soviet Russia, from pre-revolutionary years to Joseph Stalin's death, is shown through the prism of photographs and their subsequently doctored and retouched copies. The double reality of Stalin's era is best represented in the willingness to retrospectively change the past captured on the photographs. Sometimes this reality looked too ugly and had to be corrected and retouched for official displays. In other cases, the persons depicted on the images were transformed from heroes into the enemies of the people. In official publications inconvenient people were removed from group photographs, retouched and doctored. This falsification work was sometimes so perfect that it deserves to be treated not only as the evidence of the times but as a kind of art as well. But it was not the state alone that distorted the truth - ordinary Soviet citizens, for fear of being accused of treason, inked out in their family photo albums the faces of the people expunged from the official Soviet history.