I would often see photographs in history textbooks such as this http://imgur.com/uLDXcuB and it baffled me that the Soviets could do such a brilliant job in doctoring photos even before the existence of Photoshop or computers for that matter. Heck, their 'photoshop' skills are even better than some people's attempt at photoshop today.
How were these photos doctored and was this only practiced only in the USSR? (as Ive only seen examples from the USSR).
Doctoring a photo is pretty simple if you know how printing photos works. You have a negative and a piece of photo sensitive paper. You shine a light through the negative and onto the photo paper and you have a picture. If the negative is directly on the paper, it's a contact print, 1:1 ratio, or you can use an enlarger and blow up your 135 film to a 4x6 or 5x7 or whatever you want.
All the photoshop stuff is based on old darkroom techniques. If the image is a bit too dark, you simply expose a bit less time. Too light? A bit more time. Image is blurry? Use a duplicate negative to sharpen the image.
To remove a person, the quick and dirty method is simple. Make a shield to cover the photo paper, print your image, and you end up with a big white space where the shield was. To make it not as obvious, you have to fill in the spot. Using a shield to cover everything else, you can re-expose the paper and fill in the blanks. Unless you have an exact match in size, shape, color, etc, it'll still look a bit... off. But that's where artists come in. Using pencils/crayons/pens/brushes/whatever, they can blend the two images together.
If you look at your example, the doctored photo is of noticeably lower quality. Printing a photo at a lower resolution hides the messy details. The fact they were doing this with film and then printing and reprinting, and then publishing in a newspaper, most people wouldn't even think twice about it.
As for other countries, I don't have much to say on that. Lots of famous American photos have been doctored, but not necessarily at the behest of the government. Here's a Time article showing some examples from around the world. You can see US photojournalists edited some minor things and a person was added to a Civil War photo - comparable, but again, a private decision, not a government one.
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