Gustav Klutsis's design uses graphic scale to indicate political importance, hence Joseph Stalin's prominence in the composition. The device was inherited from Russian icon painting. The rest of the figures are key members of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party in 1935 including Molotov and Kalinin. All were on the brink of having their loyalty tested in by Stalin's so-called 'Great Purge' to remove dissenters of all ranks. The victims probably exceeded a million, some were executed on the spot or sent to the gulags, while the fate of others remains a mystery. Censorship campaigns saw perceived traitors in the government airbrushed or inked out of photographs. Here, the deleted man is Jānis Rudzutaks, a one-time member of the Politburo with an apparently clean record of service to the party. Klutsis himself later met a similar fate. He had once been a member of the Latvian Rifles and had defended Lenin during the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. He too, after years of loyal service to the Soviet regime, was executed at a training ground near Moscow in 1938.