While not every biography contains such a trauma, Soviet-era stories featuring an experience of state violence are not rare, and a careful eye can find traces of such experiences in family photos. We saw photographs from the 1930s to 1950s in which selected faces were blotched over with ink or cut out to remove traces of familiarity with people who had been denounced as enemies of the state.

Discovering such a photograph feels eerie, because in most cases no living witnesses remain to offer details of its story or the identity of the absent person. Indeed, the skill of “reading” state violence from these photos varies by generation. Elderly Russians often express certainty about what triggered a defacement (though many hold back on detail). Their children may have heard enough to guess, but may not know much about the missing person. The youngest family members we met were the likeliest to offer innocent explanations for a defacement: an accident, perhaps, or a quarrel.

But for every photograph defaced by fear, there are thousands bearing no trace of modification. Of course, that hardly prevents them from being enigmatic: What biographical detail isn’t shown? What is the significance of an object or person in view? What family connection has been obscured? Photographs often display details incongruent with accepted versions of the family’s past. But to notice them, one has to know where to look — which objects or backgrounds have their own stories to tell. In domestic photography, as in anthropology, an adage holds: “The tribe will tell you its secrets if you already know the secrets of the tribe.”

An example: A woman named Alina recalled seeing, in her youth, a pre-revolutionary family photograph of her great-grandparents dressed in their Sunday best in a way that implied, to her, that they were wealthy: “This was a huge peasant family, 10 to 15 people, the men all decked out in jackets, good leather boots,” she said. “The women, even girls of 3 or 5 years old, wear rows and rows of beads.” In 1930, those people would be scattered across Russia, never to see one another again, but this woman never heard her family discuss the circumstances. Alina presumed that the oldest were dispossessed as “kulaks” — peasants deemed affluent, making them potentially disloyal — and that their children fled to the cities. Her father, a security services operative, always avoided the subject. The photograph perished in a fire, and now there is no one to ask. The image, silent, remains only in her mind.