In an April 1976 essay in COMMENTARY titled “Making the World Safe for Communism,” Norman Podhoretz observed that “the Soviet Union has fewer apologists in the United States than ever before, but this is not because more people have become convinced that it is a wicked and dangerous country; it is because fewer and fewer people any longer consider the Soviet Union to be any better than the United States.” Third World revolutionary regimes still counted fans among liberal intellectuals, but, on the whole, the Communist project was intellectually exhausted by the 1970s.

Would that it were still so today. A recent surge of Communist nostalgia suggests that a Marxist revival of sorts may be afoot in some elite American quarters. Nowhere is this more apparent than in “Red Century,” the New York Times editorial page’s yearlong series of op-eds commemorating the centenary of the October Revolution.