Some of the Western audience mentioned here that the comparison of Cancel culture with Trotsky's "cancellation" in USSR is a huge stretch. I'm more familiar wi

Some of the Western audience mentioned here that the comparison of Cancel culture with Trotsky's "cancellation" in USSR is a huge stretch. I'm more familiar with the Soviet cancel culture and can assure you it's exactly the same. The author just did not show more examples, and it seems a different thing. In reality, not only Trotsky, but many other early Soviet leaders were removed from books -- by removing mentions of them and photo editing. In fact, most of the early Soviet government of 1918 fell victims of that (the reason was that they lost to Stalin in the fight for power). A famous example was Interior Comissar (Minister) Yezhov, who initiated the greatest political purge of 1937-38. He was himself arrested and executed based on falsified accusations in 1939. Mentions of him were removed (in fact in my schoolbooks in 1990 I did not see his name), him edited out of photographs. Here's a good collection of such photo editing: https://cameralabs.org/11680-sovetskij-fotoshop-kak-v-stalinskuyu-epokhu-izbavlyalis-ot-lyudej-i-perepisyvali-istoriyu https://cameralabs.org/11680-sovetskij-fotoshop-kak-v-stalin... But these examples continued into science and other areas. Scientists, teachers, book authors and actors, who'd fall in disfavor with management, were "cancelled" the same way, except not sentenced to death. Various sources mentioned they read books from 1930s-50s in libraries, and saw many pages missing or pieces cut out. In my favourite child cartoon, "Last Years Snow Was Falling", the voice actor Stanislav Sadalksy's name was not mentioned. Why? He got detained being drunk. The studio immediately "cancelled" him. His name was added to the cartoon ending titles in a separate frame years later. In 2006-07 I read an interview with Yulia Dobrovolskaya, author of a good Italian manual, who mentioned that librarians were ordered to go and either cut out pieces of books, or paint with black ink their names and citations. The reasons were mere conflicts with management of Education Ministry or even with the University management. She fell victim of that in her unversity (can't recall which one, probably Institute of Foreign Relations) and had to teach in another one (fortunately, there was some competition between them). She (IIRC) also mentioned "photopalming": putting palm trees instead of "cancelled" people in interior group photos. Importantly, this happened not because of ideological herecies, but of mere turf wars.