Commentary
There is very little new under the sun. The monument and statue destruction that we are witnessing has been witnessed in other times and other places. A tyrant’s first battlefield is to rewrite history. Most notable were the political purges of Joseph Stalin. The Soviet government erased figures from Soviet history by renaming cities—such as the Imperial capital of St. Petersburg to Petrograd and Leningrad and Stalingrad—and eradicating memories of czarist rule. Stalin’s historical revisions also included changing photographs and history books, thereby distorting children’s learning within educational establishments.
