Perhaps unsurprisingly, the centenary of the Russian Revolution was greeted in many quarters with what William Doino Jr. described in First Things as “a mix of romantic myth and Orwellian revisionism” (“Mourning the Russian Revolution,” February 27, 2017). Consider, for example, the calculated sentimentalism of The New York Times’s “Red Century” series, advertised as “exploring the history and legacy of communism.” One now-infamous article in the series, “Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism,” used the poorly sourced claim that women in countries like East Germany and Bulgaria enjoyed more sexual pleasure before the fall of the Iron Curtain to promote the genuinely obscene notion that “women had more fulfilling lives during the Communist era.” The author interviewed two nostalgic older ladies, but was unable to speak to the millions of women and girls whose lives were destroyed by forced relocation and imprisonment during Stalin’s “dekulakization,” or those who died of starvation and disease during his Five-Year Plans, or who saw their husbands and sons, fathers and brothers executed or shipped off to the Gulag during the Great Terror, and often followed them to the same fate. That the paper of record could print such mendacious rubbish is a telling symptom of the ideological sickness of our times.

The widespread collapse of journalistic standards in the United States is part of a general and rapid deterioration of thought, language, and, above all, cultural and historical memory. Like the Bolsheviks, our iconoclastic age increasingly despises the past