The “corrected” pages to the Boshevik yearbooks mailed to supporters all over the world were to be stuck in the spot where the original page was to be cut out. The canal shot is less than the tip of the iceberg.
http://www.google.com/search?q=the+commissar+vanishes
I heard that when Stalin’s last NKVD chief, Lavrenti Beria, was purged in the power struggle following Stalin’s death, owners of a Soviet encyclopedia were given a page about the Bering Sea, and told to cover up the page in the encyclopedia about Beria with that.