Surprising

We're in the middle of airbrushing our history. It's an old practice. There's a pretty good chance you've seen this famous example. The first image shows Stalin with Nikolai Yezhov, who was one of the theoreticians behind the purges of the 1930s:

Yezhov fell out of favor with Stalin and was later executed. And then he was gone:

It turns out there was more to the story than you might realize; indeed, there was another reason that Yezhov had to be airbrushed out of history:

He was pretty prescient, that Yezhov.