Victor Sebestyen’s engaging ‘Lenin’ and Anne Applebaum’s meticulous ‘Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine’ help explain why a century later the central amorality of the unfulfilled Utopian ideal is still with us

Irving Kristol positioned himself as a hard-headed realist willing to buck liberal pieties, but do his unsentimental pronouncements, collected in a new volume, stand the test of time?

David Shneer’s new book on Soviet Jewish photographers and the pictures they took offers a new perspective on 20th-century history, from the Russian Revolution to the Holocaust