Readers can see he was airbrushed out of the photo, but Shvernik was lucky. Antiopov, who rose to become Deputy Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, was the first to fall out of Stalin’s favor. Shvernik vanished next. It shows Nikolai Antipov (left), Joseph Stalin, Sergei Kirov (right), and Nikolai Shvernik (far right). The original photo (top left) was taken at the Fifteenth Leningrad Regional Party Conference in 1924 or 1925. I've long known of Stalin's knack for erasing his enemies from Party photos once they had fallen out of his favor, but I recently stumbled on a wonderful visual example of it (see above). Stalin employed terror with a zeal and skill few could match, marginalizing rivals such as Leon Trotsky, who was expelled from the Politburo, exiled, tried and found guilty in absentia, and eventually erased from the Party's history.
It's no secret that governments in the 20th century killed a lot of people, but few did it with greater efficiency than Joe Stalin, whose policy of forced collectivization killed an estimated 14.5 million people between 1930-1937.
