I always get a kick out of that old Soviet picture. The person airbrushed out of existence was Nikolai Yezhov, Stalin’s first head of the Soviet secret police and he was a brutal butcher. One of the reasons he rose in Stalin’s ranks was due to his ruthlessness until he fell out of favor with Stalin and met a similar fate.
Yezhov was a victim of his own murderous success. Having directed the arrest & extermination of over a million Soviet citizens during the NKVD’s “Yezhovshchina” purge, he became in Stalin’s eyes someone who knew too much & had seen too much.
So Yezhov was arrested, shot, tried, & cremated. Liquidated, in other words.