The eraser is a key tool of autocrats. Authoritarians wield their power to silence dissent, suppress disfavored narratives, cover up misdeeds, and protect themselves from accountability. In past generations, regimes engaged in painstaking efforts to bury or even burn books, documents, and periodicals perceived to pose a threat to their continued rule, including documentation of their own abuses.
In the digital age, deletion has gone high tech. Repressive governments can make entire websites disappear and erase archives and social media accounts at the push of a button, eliminating historical records and expunging vital information. The ease of erasure at a mass scale raises the pressing need to ensure that vulnerable digital materials—journalism, history, photography, video, government records—are safeguarded. Preserving such records is vital to resurrect shattered cultures, recount stories of oppression, and hold perpetrators accountable. And archiving authoritarianism may prove an essential tool in defeating it.
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A vintage black and white photo shows a man leaning over a large table covered in small files in a room filled with similar files. - A worker flips through file cards detailing ancestry records inside Nazi Germany’s “Department for Family Research” in Germany circa 1940. Hulton Archive/Getty Images
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A person is seen at the end of an aisle. On either side are drawers stacked to the ceilings in a giant archive. - An International Tracing Service employee researches documents at the Holocaust Archive in Arolsen, Germany, on April 28, 2006. The country allowed access to 50 million references for 17.5 million people in the world’s largest Holocaust archive. Ralph Orlowski/Getty Images
The world’s understanding of the Nazi period has relied on photos, diaries, letters, poems, and drawings that brought destroyed families and communities to life. Pre-revolutionary cinema and photography from Iran provides a vivid reminder of the vibrant, urbane, and highly experimental culture that existed before the rule of the ayatollahs. Personal diaries have provided a powerful window into the social conditions and mindsets that prevailed in China as the Cultural Revolution took hold. It was only after 50 years, in the 2010s, that China began opening up government archives on the period.
Preserving government records is also necessary. Many authoritarian regimes have been meticulous record-keepers. Through its vast network of amateur spies, East Germany’s Stasi secret police kept files on 5.6 million people. As communist rule fell away, smoke erupted from a regional Stasi headquarters prompting a group of women activists to occupy the building to prevent the records from being incinerated, determined to preserve the record of repression.
As of 2015, more than 7 million Germans had applied to view their Stasi files. In the Soviet Union, as the government collapsed, one of the principle demands of reformers was to lay bare the KGB archives that documented the mass scale of horrors painstakingly pieced together by Russian dissident writers, including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn of the Gulag Archipelago. Newly surfaced archives in Syria have begun to reveal the extent of the Assad regime’s massive surveillance network and the tentacles it used to infiltrate opposition groups.
Records and accounts of authoritarian regimes have been crucial tools in helping society understand and judge these regimes. After World War II, Allied armies had collected a ton of evidence—millions of documents, photographs, and films—and presented the most compelling at Nuremberg and other trials; it was all housed in the U.S. National Archives afterward.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia amassed a huge trove of documents. Chinese author Yang Jisheng used his position as a journalist at China’s state-controlled Xinhua News Agency to collect documents totaling more than 10 million words, which formed the basis of his landmark book, Tombstone. The work stands as the definitive account of China’s Great Famine and the 36 million lives it took. Though banned in mainland China, the book is widely circulated there in bootleg form. As Yang put it: “Our history is all fabricated. It’s been covered up. If a country can’t face its own history, then it has no future.”
An employee at the Stasi Records Archive analyzes ripped documents in Berlin on Jan. 23, 2012. The German government is working to scan torn documents and use computer software to piece them back together after Stasi members destroyed thousands of records in the weeks leading up to the collapse of East Germany in 1989.Sean Gallup/Getty Images
Governments of all kinds understand the power of the written word, pictures, and narratives to shape historical memory. A 2012 report found that the United Kingdom had both unlawfully hidden and systematically destroyed records of the final days of the British Empire, not wanting damning revelations that “might embarrass Her Majesty’s government” to be accessible to newly independent states.
The risks that digital transformation poses for our ability to document, research, interpret, and understand authoritarianism are clear. The shift to online communications has allowed troves of messages and directives that might once have been conveyed by printed cables, letters, or memos to be effectuated through texts, emails, or social media channels that will never exist in physical form unless printed or digitally preserved.
Online information troves are generally less stable than physical libraries due to link rot—the phenomenon of hyperlinks becoming less likely to point to the original file in question because material has been moved or taken down—data migration, storage limitations, and technology upgrades routinely overwriting the past. The Internet Archive, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that began its work in 1996 just as the internet itself picked up steam, and a series of subsidiaries have evolved over nearly 30 years to shore up these gaps and preserve records, but they are not comprehensive, and they lack access to much of the most sensitive material from closed or threatened societies.
Moreover, as autocracies exert their sovereignty to tighten strictures on the online spheres accessible to their citizens, the digital sphere is becoming increasingly balkanized and imperiled. By demanding that tech companies house operations and data centers within their territories in order to serve consumers there, countries are more easily able to block and disable websites they don’t like and to centralize the technical infrastructure upon which those sites depend.
The result is that media archives and records that might once have needed to be shredded or torched can now be wiped with the press of a button. After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, President Vladimir Putin issued a sweeping declaration that branded the country’s entire independent media sector as foreign agents. All privately owned media channels were barred from broadcasting inside Russia.
Russia’s media regulator, Roskomnadzor, revoked the registration of respected newspaper Novaya Gazeta, forcing most of its journalists into exile and disabling its website inside Russia. Dozens of other media outlets followed suit, with more than 1,500 journalists fleeing into exile and the fate of their websites and digital archives hanging in the balance. Journalists scrambled to secure their life’s work outside of Russian borders, fearing it could be wiped out by government decree.
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In China, where all internet companies operate at the pleasure of the Chinese Communist Party, authorities have been systematically purging vast swaths of the internet. A 2024 post on WeChat revealed that nearly all information posted online between late 1990s and mid-2000s had been expunged. The post itself was soon censored and vanished.
Events like the Sichuan earthquake of 2008, which killed more than 68,000 people and prompted a ferocious online debate over China’s shoddy building standards, have been almost entirely scrubbed from China’s online realm. Recent scandals, including one involving the transportation of cooking oil in unsanitary tankers, are also routinely suppressed. Discussion of the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising is still considered so taboo that many young Chinese are unaware until they travel overseas and have unfettered access to the internet and history books.
Intensifying censorship under Chinese President Xi Jinping’s rule over the last 12 years has led Chinese internet companies to wipe out content that could get them in trouble, leading to a sharp reduction in the total number of websites available on the mainland. Award-winning Chinese American filmmaker Nanfu Wang, who has focused on controversial topics like the brutal tactics used to implement China’s one-child policy, has seen her films made inaccessible and her presence in directories and film sites obliterated.
Online accounts of dissidents and independent journalists have similarly disappeared, wiping away reams of content and expression. Artificial intelligence and automation will further facilitate these efforts; it is already making it possible to efficiently expunge specific words and topics from the digital realm while promoting others that match preferred government messages.
An undated photo shows people working on an early model of IBM’s virtual storage computer, which introduced a new concept in information storage.Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
In the face of this wholesale destruction, archivists, nongovernmental organizations, and exiled Russian journalists are beginning to take steps to preserve vulnerable histories. In 2023, PEN America and Bard College launched the Russian Independent Media Archive. The archive aims to restore the historical record, elevate the work of independent journalists, and allow for a deeper excavation of Russia’s past. The collection is growing, and it now includes the blog archive of murdered dissident and political leader Alexei Navalny.
China analyst and expert Ian Johnson started China Unofficial Archive, an online collection aimed at making important written and visual records of independent thinkers and creators accessible. Other sites, like China Digital Times and GreatFire.org, have cropped up with similar missions to collate, preserve, and publicize vulnerable information.
But several efforts to collect and display personal accounts of Chinese affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns have been futile, as Beijing swiftly censored the content. The value of such troves as a tool to enable societies to reckon with and overcome trauma is overlooked, as the imperative of obliterating the record of government misdeeds and overreach takes precedence.
Current wars raging in Gaza and Sudan have brought poignant reminders of the enduring vulnerability of physical archives and cultural treasures in armed conflict, with major collections of historical material being destroyed by bombs or arson. In war-torn regions, digital backstops for culture and history are vital to fortify cultures under threat, elucidate the past, and ensure the preservation of historical memory necessary to overcome violence and undergird resilience.
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Palestine Nexus has collected more than 40,000 maps, diaries, manuscripts, films, and newspapers, providing a bulwark against the risk of cultural erasure. Sudan Memory, funded by the British Council Cultural Protection Fund and Aliph Foundation, works with institutions across Sudan to capture their collections digitally and gather the papers and works of influential artists and intellectuals. In 2024, a group of international organizations launched the Iranian Archive, which holds more than 1 million digital artifacts—drawn heavily from social media channels—documenting the historic “Women, Life, Freedom” protest movement in Iran.
But more systematic approaches are needed. In places like Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Ukraine, preventive measures should be taken to replicate valuable materials and house them abroad for safekeeping. Foundations, international institutions, and governments engaged in countering authoritarianism should include archiving among their investments. In the context of transition and reconstruction efforts in war-torn places, the safeguarding of online materials should be incorporated into planning. While there may be little that can be done to prevent authoritarians from purging records under their control, those who seek to preserve such historic materials should be able to find support and protection from the international community.
Online journalism, photos, videos, social media posts, and records offer a first draft of history in raw form, providing indispensable insights for future generations of scholars, intellectuals, artists, and interpreters of all kinds. In the ongoing struggle against authoritarianism, memory is an essential asset.