According to George Orwell, there's a simple reason authoritarian cultural campaigns can't last: They assume that history can be 'created rather than learned,' he wrote in a 1947 Atlantic essay, and this produces superficial literature, unstable and fleeting. By contrast, free societies promote 'intellectual liberty' and the belief that 'a correct knowledge of history is valuable as a matter of course.' Their art lasts because it has depth, and it has depth because it has truth. Take Soviet Communist Party propaganda. As my colleague Anne Applebaum has written, throughout the 20th century, the party's posters and films were meant to be 'overwhelming and inspiring,' with strong visual styles, rousing music, and a clear message: Here is the bounty of a communist society, with its abundant harvest and strong, healthy workers. But many of those spectacles fell short, Anne observed: When people saw them, they felt a chasm between the propaganda's veneer and their own 'impoverished...
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