The Great Experiment in Mass Murder

Since the beginning of the centennial of World War I, I have been writing a series of essays about the war as the memory of events passes us by–a hundred years later. But as we approach the centennial of the Bolshevik Revolution, I find it nearly impossible to delimit my thoughts on this profound event in the history of the human race as if it were only a passage of the war, like the Somme, or American intervention, or the internment of enemy aliens.

There are so many narrations of the “event...