Legendary Life photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White explained how she snapped the above picture of Joseph Stalin smiling–well, smiling  by his somber standards–in quotes that ran in her 1971 New York Times obituary, I actually don’t know if she did the world a favor by locating a softer-looking Stalin, but here’s an excerpt:

“For her meeting with Stalin in the Kremlin in 1941, which was arranged by Harry Hopkins, Miss Bourke-White employed a stratagem to catch him off guard. Recalling the incident, she wrote:

‘I made up my mind that I wouldn’t leave without getting a picture of Stalin smiling. When I met him, his face looked as though it were carved out of stone, he wouldn’t show any emotion at all. I went virtually beserk trying to make that great stone face come alive.

‘I got down on my hands and knees on the floor and tried out all kinds of crazy postures searching for a good camera angle. Stalin looke down at the way I was aquirming and writhing and for the space of a lightning flash he smiled-and I got my picture. Probably, he had never seen a girl photographer before and my weird contortions amused him.’

Miss Bourke-White maintained that ‘a woman shoudn’t trade on the fact that she is a woman.’ Nonetheless, several of her male colleagues were certain that her fetching looks–she was tall, slim, dark-haired and possessed of a beautiful face–were often employed to her advantage.

‘Generals rushed to tote her cameras,’ Mr. [Alfred] Eisenstadt recalled, ‘and even Stalin insisted on carrying her bags.'”

Margaret Bourke-White, 1964.