Wilson Is Overtaking Lenin

Three-fourths through the twentieth century we can look back and see the main things in the enormous landscape emerging. It is an American-Russian landscape. What a few men—Napoleon, the Abbéde Pradt, Tocqueville—predicted early in the nineteenth century, has come about. After Spain, France, Britain, each with its century under the sun, the American and the Russian empires rose to dominate much of the world, including the old continent of Europe. During their rise—and this had not been predicted—they became transformed into new kinds of empires, peculiar to each,

The two principal architects of these imperial transformations were Wilson and Lenin. They died at the same time, in 1924, exactly 50 years ago, half a world apart, less than a fortnight apart—Lenin on a Monday, January 21, Wilson on a Sunday,’ February 3. Fifty years later the calendar reverts to the same order, the anniversaries of their deaths fall on the same days of the week, which is somehow fitting: for the lives and the deaths of these two different men were shot through with many coincidences.

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John Lukacs

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Three-fourths through the twentieth century we can look back and see the main things in the enormous landscape emerging. It is an American-Russian landscape. What a few men—Napoleon, the Abbéde Pradt, Tocqueville—predicted early in the nineteenth century, has come about. After Spain, France, Britain, each with its century under the sun, the American and the Russian empires rose to dominate much of the world, including the old continent of Europe. During their rise—and this had not been predicted—they became transformed into new kinds of empires, peculiar to each,

The two principal architects of these imperial transformations were Wilson and Lenin. They died at the same time, in 1924, exactly 50 years ago, half a world apart, less than a fortnight apart—Lenin on a Monday, January 21, Wilson on a Sunday,’ February 3. Fifty years later the calendar reverts to the same order, the anniversaries of their deaths fall on the same days of the week, which is somehow fitting: for the lives and the deaths of these two different men were shot through with many coincidences.