North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un purged his powerful uncle, Jang Song Thaek, during a high-level meeting of the Political Bureau, part of the Central Committee of the Korean Workers’ Party. Footage of the meeting on Monday displayed all the classic set pieces of a totalitarian purge: a bizarre litany of charges, tearful denunciations by former comrades and the forcible removal of the renegade. Jang then disappeared, and North Korea said Friday that he had been executed.

It appears that despite his youth, Kim is pretty old-school: the shaming, purging and dispatch of Jang borrows classic tactics from any number of totalitarian dictators faced with threats to their power. But what made Kim’s purge especially retro was the news that Jang has been airbrushed out of existing photos and videos.

In this regard, Kim was taking a cue from Josef Stalin, who pioneered this kind of perverse manipulation of history as part of the Great Purge in the 1930s in which much of the nation’s revolutionary leadership was sent to the grave, victims of horrific torture, ludicrous show trials and ultimately bullets to the back of the head. The accused family members and associates often suffered the same fate.

But that wasn’t enough. Stalin and his censors simultaneously launched an attack on the memory of the deceased-a second death of sorts. Any mention of once-prominent revolutionaries who had fallen afoul of Stalin-Bukharin, Kamenev, Zinoviev and others-was ruthlesslyscrubbed from printed material, photographs and other evidence of the past.

The assault on the past led to bizarre complications for Stalin’s propaganda machine. History of the Civil War in the U.S.S.R., an illustrated volume designed to celebrate the revolution, had to be revised in 1938 because many of the revolutionaries exalted in the first edition had been purged and more often than not killed. It was revised again in 1943 because additional “heroes” had fallen from favor. As his rivals disappeared from history, Stalin’s role grew more exaggerated and larger than life.

Stalin still holds the crown for manipulation of memory. A photograph taken in 1919 showed 18 revolutionaries surrounding Stalin and Lenin. Over time, Stalin murdered 11 of the men and three committed suicide. They each gradually disappeared from the picture, leaving only Stalin and Lenin. In the final version, even Lenin has vanished, leaving only one leader, past and present.

Stalin probably did more to eliminate vestiges of Leon Trotsky than any other rival. After Trotsky went into exile, Stalin’s censors systematically eliminated the once-famous revolutionary from countless pictures. This was no mean feat: Trotsky had been ubiquitous in the imagery of the Russian Revolution. Still, it was not enough to banish him from history. He had to die, too. In 1940, a Soviet agent assassinated the aging revolutionary in Mexico using an ice pick. -

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Stephen Mihm is an associate professor of history at the University of Georgia.

Editorial, Pages 14 on 12/16/2013