In 1800, in the United States, the word was used in a political context, when a Philadelphia
Aurora editorial said that "if you do not whitewash
President Adams speedily, the
Democrats, like swarms of flies, will bespatter him all over, and make you both as speckled as a dirty wall, and as black as the
devil." In the 20th century, many
dictatorships,
authoritarian and
totalitarian states used whitewashing in order to glorify the results of war. For instance, during the
Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia following the
Prague Spring of 1968, the Press Group of Soviet Journalists released a collection of "facts, documents, press reports and eye-witness accounts." Western journalists promptly nicknamed it "The White Book", both for its white cover and its attempts to whitewash the invasion by creating the impression that the
Warsaw Pact countries had the right and duty to invade. In the study of
reputation systems by means of
algorithmic game theory, whitewashing refers to the abandonment of a tarnished identity and creation of a blank one, which is more widely known in
internet slang as
sockpuppeting. According to the Eastern Europe and Central Asia desk director for the
International Federation for Human Rights, Ilya Nuzov, Russia is trying to whitewash the country's repressive Stalinist past. On August 30, 2021,
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that the "attacks" on the Soviet dictator
Joseph Stalin are part of attacks on Russia's past and the results of
World War II. Russian politician and former deputy of the
State Duma said that Lavrov "made an attempt to whitewash Stalin, which clearly, during the period of repressive measures carried out by the authorities, showed the kinship of the authorities with the
Communist Party of the Russian Federation – the same Stalin admirers." Russian literary critic and culturologist noted that "the whitewashing of domestic
ghouls only indicates that the current rulers feel a spiritual kinship with them." ==See also==