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After winning the power struggle against Leon Trotsky, Joseph Stalin disseminated photographs of himself standing next to Vladimir Lenin doctored to make it seem as if Stalin alone was the designated successor to Lenin. He simply deleted the people he did not like from the photo. On his right, in a photograph of him touring a waterway near Moscow, stood his faithful servant Nikolai Yezhov. Nicknamed ¡°The Bloody Dwarf¡± and responsible for orchestrating Stalin¡¯s purges, he disappeared from the photo after he himself had been purged in 1939.
Lenin doctored photographs to increase the size of crowds in protests or write revolutionary slogans in banners held by protesters. Mao Zedong, Adolf Hitler and Fidel Castro all removed people they did not like from photographs. Leonid Brezhnev made his censors delete liquor and cigarettes on top of a desk in photos of him speaking with West German chancellor Willy Brandt. For dictators, doctoring photographs is all in a day¡¯s work.
In October 1945, Soviet military officers were standing behind Kim Il-sung to guard him during a welcome celebration. But at some point, these officials were removed from the photo. A photo taken of Kim at a ceremony commemorating the founding of the North Korean Workers¡¯ Party in August 1946, a large portrait of Stalin hangs behind the North Korean leader. In later versions of the photo, the portrait is gone. Following the Sino-Soviet conflict, North Korea sought to shake off the remnants of Soviet influence and play up its juche or self-reliance ideology.
Now The Times of London offers evidence that a photograph the North Korean media published last week of Kim Jong-il touring a military base was doctored. The shadow of the legs of the soldiers standing next to Kim are slightly slanted, but Kim's legs cast a straight shadow, and a black line that runs behind the legs of the rostrum mysteriously disappears either side of Kim. The BBC blew up the image in the area around Kim's left foot and found that the pixels around the ground where he is standing do not match the rest of the picture, suggesting that Kim has been superimposed.
When North Korea first published a photo of Kim touring a military base on Oct. 11, apparently to prove that he was well, the grass and trees in the picture were light green, making it hard to believe the photo was taken in October. Another photo showing Kim supposedly watching a soccer match and appearing to give an order also showed an awkward sense of perspective in the area surrounding him. The new photo showing Kim touring the military base is of a quality where even novices can detect tampering. It was comments by a reader in Malaysia that are said to have prompted the British media to begin investigating the authenticity of the photos. It makes one wonder what South Korean intelligence officials have been doing all this time.
The column was contributed by Chosun Ilbo in-house columnist Lee Seon-min.
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