Ten or eleven years ago I made a short visit to the then still Soviet Union. I did a very poor job of finding gifts to bring back to friends, but for one friend I think I hit the jackpot quite well. This friend was raised in the States in a Yiddishist/Communist family, and I figured that for him a set of photographs of the members of the Politburo would be quite a treat. It was the beginning of Glasnost, and Gorbachov was head honcho.

The photograph of Gorbachov in this set looked a good deal like him, except that his forehead was clean of his distinguishing birthmark. Back in pre-digital times doctoring a photo in this way was called "air-brushing", and though it wasn't really very complicated, in the digital era it's downright simple.

And think of all those stories of how the photographs of the the Soviet leaders waving to the public had to be doctored in order to make them representative of the ever-changing hierarchy - taking someone out of the picture, moving someone else closer to the undisputed leader; how the history books had to be rewritten to show that someone who used to be a hero yesterday was actually a renegade all along. Digital technology certainly would have made life a lot easier for whoever wrote, and rewrote, those textbooks

And though we're well into the digital age, we're not always sure just when a falling leaf is really a falling leaf.