[FPSPACE] Soviet cosmonaut photo forgeries -- who did it, and why?

[Keith Gottschalk]

Dear Jim,

   How ironic that now Abode Photoshop and its freeware rivals make
this easier to do even in democracies & the corporate world.

    In the pre-digital decades, I presume this could only be done by
(is the title correct?) "touch-up artists" who would have 1. to paint by
hand over parts of a photo, & then 
2. get photographic darkroom technicians to blur the rejoined borders
of the remaining parts of the old photo, or the borders of the new bit.

 Technically, this is equivalent to one of the techniques Chesley
Bonestell sometimes used in his 1940s and 1950s planetary art. A Soviet
innocent variant of it was to draw in stronger lines where the border
between two objects is unclear in the original photo.

     As your 2nd last para notes, this was on a scale that must have
required staff in permanent posts to serve all state departments &
parastatals. So an enquiry should start with the Q: were the forged /
touched-up photos issued by, or through, a Soviet press agency? If so,
its photographic department would surely be where the touch-up artists
worked.

       I am presuming that the KGB & other secret services  would only
do this sort of thing when fabricating disinformation to plant in major
political or counter-intelligence cases. 

     What we are discussing is by those standards trivial publicity
releases for a civilian parastatal to merely "tidy up" its photos. No
political dissenters were involved. It is like a high school
surreptitiously removing from its grade 12 photos & mementos all mention
of the kid who was expelled for drunkenness or was a drop-out. Cases so
"trivial" must have been done by civilians. I am sure that after 1991
there must be at least one article in the Russian-language press by or
about someone with such memoirs. They have published the memoirs of a
now extremely elderly executioner from the Katyn forest 1939 massacre of
Poles - so there surely must have been published reports on these vastly
less embarrassing photoshop-by-hand touch-up artists.

  The "why"? No one in the West felt sheepish that some candidate
astronauts did not qualify, or were dropped for medical reasons. So this
points to some paranoically defensive bureaucrat. Whether in the
cosmonautics agency itself, or in the media agency, we don't yet know.

yours,  Keith

>>>> "Jim Oberg" <jeoberg at comcast.net> 10/14/07 10:45 PM >>>
>I'm finishing up a presentation for a space history conference,
>in a more scholarly tone than my "Cosmonaut/Cosmo-NOT"
>public lecture (http://www.jamesoberg.com/cosmonot.pdf),
>and there remains one serious gap in the discussion.
>
>WHO actually performed these forgeries? Where? In
>accordance with what guidance and what authority?
>
>Sure, these were totally in keeping with official Soviet
>news fabrication/falsification policies going back to the
>very beginning of the Soviet state -- so there must have
>been an existing 'infrastructure' whose job it was to produce
>'corrected' visual materials for public (and foreign) consumption.
>
>But do we know anything about the nature of this bureacracy,
>and its specialists?

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