History illuminates the present. I've been reading Stephen Kotkin's widely and justly praised multi-volume biography of Joseph Stalin and have encountered many passages that illuminate the present.

I learned, for example, that Stalin met the exiled Vladimir Lenin more than a decade before the October 1917 revolution, and that from the early 1920s until his death in 1924, Lenin was in failing health, confined to an estate with "a staff, including the worker-cook Spiridon Putin," Russian President Vladimir Putin's grandfather.

That provides an interesting context for Vladimir Putin's 2005 speech in which he said that "the collapse of the Soviet Union was the biggest geopolitical catastrophe of the century."

I see echoes of the present as well in the early Bolsheviks' bewilderment on just how to put Marxist theory into practice in a war-torn Russia.

"We go forward to the complete elimination of money," Grigory Zinoviev explained to German socialists in 1920. "We pay wages in commodities. We introduce trolleys without fares. We have free public schools, free, if temporarily poor, meals, rent-free apartments, free lighting.

"We are realizing all this," he went on, "very slowly, under the most difficult conditions. We have to fight ceaselessly, but we have a way out, a plan." The early Soviets sound very much like the Democratic Socialists of America.

Compare DSA co-chairwoman Megan Romer talking about people having "democratic control" of their workplaces, housing, "everybody having a union," "the working class being in charge of the means of production."

It's clear, if you........

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