21 Lessons for the 21st Century

by Yuval Noah Harari

The Soviet propaganda machine was equally agile with the truth, rewriting the history of everything from entire wars to individual photographs. On June 29, 1936, the official newspaper Pravda (the name means “truth”) carried on its front page a photo of a smiling Joseph Stalin embracing Gelya Markizova, a seven-year-old girl. The image became a Stalinist icon, enshrining Stalin as the “Father of the Nation” and idealizing the “happy Soviet childhood.” Printing presses and factories all over the country began churning out millions of posters, sculptures, and mosaics of the scene, which were displayed in public institutions from one end of the Soviet Union to the other. Just as no Russian Orthodox church was complete without an icon of the Virgin Mary holding baby Jesus, so no Soviet school could do without an icon of Papa Stalin holding little Gelya. Alas, in Stalin’s empire fame was often an invitation to disaster. Within a year, Gelya’s father was arrested on the bogus charges that he was a Japanese spy and a Trotskyite terrorist. In 1938 he was executed, one of millions of victims of the Stalinist terror. Gelya and her mother were exiled to Kazakhstan, where the mother soon died under mysterious circumstances. What to do now with the countless icons depicting the Father of the Nation with a daughter of a convicted “enemy of the people”? No problem. From that moment onward, Gelya Markizova vanished, and the “happy Soviet child” in the ubiquitous image was identified as Ma...