This Week in Books: History Scares Authoritarians

This is an edition of the revamped Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.

For many who were purged during Stalin’s reign in the Soviet Union, one erasure followed another. After being sent to the Gulag (if they weren’t shot in the basement of the Lubyanka building), the ousted person would suffer the further indignity of having their face crosshatched with frantic pen marks to make them disappear from family albums. They couldn’t exist in history anymore. Stalin’s greatest rivals were erased on a wide scale too: Leon Trotsky’s image, for example, was out of official photos. Control over the historical record has always been crucial for authoritarian regimes. In Russia, this is true all over again, and textbooks are the history of the war in Ukraine in real time. In China, particularly under the rule of Xi Jinping, the flattening and polishing of the past now have the help of digital firewalls. Preserving a history that the authorities want forgotten is a quixotic task. But a few brave filmmakers, artists, and writers are nevertheless trying.