The motivations for issuing this new article were clearly political (expunge Beria!) and economic (do it cheaply!). Rather than reprint the entire encyclopedia, which would have cost time and resources, the Soviets instead found a cheaper solution: to write an addendum page-an extended article about the Bering Strait-and then send it to all registered owners of the volumes, with instructions that they should paste the new page over the Beria article, thereby obfuscating it. This meant that the article had to be amended.
The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, issued since 1926, had a positive article on Beria that was now an embarrassment. Stalin had just died, and Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria, the chief of Stalin’s secret police, had fallen out of favor.
In response to an event in the Soviet Union in 1953 George Orwell wrote, “He who controls the present controls the past, and he who controls the past controls the future.” He was referring to an incident that involved a strategic adjustment to a book.
0 kommentar(er)
