New Delhi: SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Wednesday tweeted another post about the newly appointed CEO of Twitter, Parag Agarwal. Musk shared a ‘dark meme’ without caption, to highlight the fact that Agarwal has taken over Jack Dorsey’s post as the CEO of the microblogging platform. The photo shared by Musk is a photoshopped image of Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, a Soviet political leader, and Nikolai Yezhov, a Soviet secret police officer under Stalin.
Yezhov was removed from the original image after his execution in 1940. In the meme shared by Musk, Agarwal’s face is photoshopped on top of Stalin’s, while Dorsey’s face is placed atop Yezhov’s torso. Stalin was the head of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) of the Ministry of the Interior of the Soviet Union from 1936 to 1938 during the height of the Great Purge. In 1940, Yezhov, among others, was executed for his role in the Purge.
Musk apparently tried to draw parallels between Agarwal’s handling of Dorsey’s situation and Stalin’s censors removing Yezhov from the photographic record via memes.
Here’s what Musk tweeted:
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 1, 2021
The historical background behind the infamous photo of Stalin and Yezhov
Yezhov was a Soviet secret police officer under Stalin and organized mass arrests, torture and executions during the Great Purge. The Great Purge, or Great Terror, also known as the Year of ’37 and Yezhovshina (Yezov Period), was a campaign of political repression in the Soviet Union led by Soviet General Secretary Stalin. The Great Purge was characterized by large-scale repression of peasants and ethnic cleansing. From 1937 to 1938, more than half a million Soviet civilians died during repression.
However, Yezhov later fell out of favor with Stalin, and was arrested after confessing to having carried out a series of anti-Soviet activities. Yezhov was of short stature, which is why he was nicknamed “The Poison Dwarf”. After his execution, the infamous photograph was neatly edited to remove “The Poison Dwarf”.
Just as Yezhov was removed from the image after being hanged, Dorsey has also been removed in a photoshopped image shared by Musk as a meme after he stepped down as CEO of Twitter.
Agarwal replaced Dorsey as Twitter’s CEO on Monday, November 29.
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