
November marks a pair of important anniversaries, bookends of a dark period in human history. In the first week of November (often dated October by the older Julian calendar) 1917, Russian revolutionaries under Vladimir Lenin overthrew the moderate socialist government of Alexander Kerensky and established the first Marxist regime. Almost precisely 72 years later, on November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall came down, and with it (at least symbolically) the diabolical worldview that had trapped and enslaved a third of humanity…