World War I killed off nations, empires including Russia’s, and fifteen million people. It left in its wake an intellectual climate that celebrated the forces of unreason, violence, and primitive myth—in books, novels, art, music, and politics. In fact, a postwar generation would teach Europe to think about politics as an art in which great leaders of genius, like great artists, could weld men together and magically create new, higher forms of community, akin to the imagined utopias of earlier ages.
