Lenin was born 150 years ago this week. His death 54 years later marked the emergence of a frightful new quasi-religious sect, with Josef Stalin as its high priest.

Coronavirus is Orban’s Reichstag fire.

After defecting from Poland, the Nobel Prize-winning poet Czeslaw Milosz found himself at Berkeley—an opponent of communism, but distrusting both conservatism and the counterculture. A newly discovered letter from the period, written to James Burnham, resonates today for its wise skepticism of ideological certainties.