Today, Russia marks an awkward centennial. Nov. 7 is the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, in which a faction of Marxist revolutionaries led by Vladimir Lenin toppled the weak provisional government put in place after Tsar Nicholas II was ousted months earlier. The heady events of 1917 soon gave way to the consolidation of a vast totalitarian state, built on the bones of millions caught up in sweeping purges, which for the better part of a century challenged American hegemony across the globe under the red banner of communism.
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Ishaan Tharoor: A century after the Bolshevik Revolution, Russia has its tsar
A employee waits for customers beneath T-shirts featuring Russian President Vladimir Putin at a gift shop in an underground crossing in Moscow on Feb. 14.
