There is an old Soviet joke about history. Under communism, it goes, the future is certain; it is the past that is unpredictable. The joke illuminates the truth that, if you believe the triumph of communism is historically inevitable, then the task of keeping history on the right track—confined to a narrative about the onward march of invariably correct decisions—never ceases.
But history is a slippery creature. It can find surprising hiding places while it waits for its opportunity. As Julian Gewirtz explores in Never Turn Back, which tells the story of the political arguments that raged in China in the 1980s, that same country is today defined by a debate that had been erased; and, as Tania Branigan demonstrates in Red Memory, her penetrating study of the buried stories of the Cultural Revolution of 1966 to 1976, history censored in the public realm retreats to private spaces, often to emerge years later and take its revenge. Given that some 36 million people were persecuted in the Cultural Revolution and some two million were murdered, even suppressed stories have consequences.