Strobe Talbott, The New York Times, October 18, 2017: “A hundred years ago, a malignant form of governance, both modern and barbaric, slouched towards St. Petersburg to be born. As it grew, it swept across Eurasia, enveloping the largest territorial state on the planet and cloning itself elsewhere. As the decades passed, the monstrosity was given a name: totalitarianism. Its original Russian manifestation had two German connections. One was historical and ideological: Russian revolutionaries claimed to be the founders of the promised land prophesied by Karl Marx, a 19th-century Prussian-born philosopher. The other was contemporaneous and geopolitical: In a vain effort to win World War I, Emperor Wilhelm II’s high command helped Russian Marxists seize power and make peace with Berlin. Looming in the future was Germany’s own experience with totalitarianism: the emergence in the early 1930s of a predatory police state that initiated the Holocaust and a world war, more cataclysmic than the first. While the blame for this carnage can be parceled out to myriad murderers, psychopaths, toadies, cowards and, of course, those who were “just following orders,” the twin evils were, ultimately, the work of two individuals: Stalin and Hitler. They are exemplars of a villainous version of Thomas Carlyle’s Great Man Theory…”