It wasn’t simply another history book, The Short Course. It served as the primary history textbook for academic institutions all over the USSR. It took the place of all earlier books that had pages eliminated or concealed using tape. The book, which Stalin is said to have written, had reportedly sold 34 million copies in the USSR and 2 million copies internationally by 1948. To support the rewritten history, photographs were manipulated. Enemies were erased out of images and Stalin was added. It appeared as though Stalin wanted to erase them from public memory of the period.