Anne Applebaum:

Ninety years ago this week, a Bolshevik mob stormed the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, arrested the provisional government and installed a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Though the Russian Revolution is no longer widely celebrated (not even by Russians, who instead commemorate the expulsion of the Poles from Moscow in 1612), I felt it important to mark the occasion. In honor of the anniversary, I reread ” Ten Days That Shook the World,” the famed account of the revolution by John Reed, the American journalist and fellow traveler. Then I reread last week’s press reports of the recent encounter between Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan president, and Naomi Campbell, the British supermodel.

Just as I’d remembered, Reed’s book superbly transmits the breathless energy of the autumn of 1917 — “Adventure it was, and one of the most marvellous mankind ever embarked upon, sweeping into history at the head of the toiling masses” — as well as his fascination with, and approval of, the violence he saw around him. After attending a mass funeral, he understood, he writes, why the Russians no longer need religion: “On earth they were building a kingdom more bright than any heaven had to offer, and for which it was a glory to die.” By contrast, he is abashed when he has to explain that in America, people try to change things by law — a state of affairs that his new Russian comrades find “incredible.”

Fast-forward 90 years, and surprisingly little has changed. True, the Russian Revolution itself is no longer much admired, not even by Reed’s heirs on the far left. But the impulse that drew Reed to St. Petersburg remains. The Western weakness for other people’s revolutionary violence, the belief in the glamour and benevolence of foreign dictators, and the insistence on seeing both through the prism of Western political debates, are still very much with us.

Exhibit A is Campbell. Though better known for her taste in shoes than for her opinions about Latin American economics, she nevertheless turned up in Caracas last week gushing about the “love and encouragement” Chávez pours into his welfare programs.

Wearing what a Venezuelan newspaper called “a revolutionary and exquisite white dress from the prestigious Fendi fashion house,” she praised the country for its “big waterfalls.” Not surprisingly, Campbell did not mention the anti-Chávez demonstrations held in Caracas the week before her visit; proposed constitutional changes designed to let Chávez remain in power indefinitely; or Chávez’s record of harassing opposition leaders and the media.

But then, that wasn’t the point of her visit, just as it wasn’t the point when actor Sean Penn, a self-conscious “radical” and avowed enemy of the American president, spent a whole day with Chávez. Together, the actor and the president toured the countryside. “I came here looking for a great country. I found a great country,” Penn declared. Of course he found a great country! Penn wanted a country where he would win adulation for his views about American politics, and the Venezuelan president happily provided it.

Ten Days That Shook the World was made into the film Reds by Warren Beatty, another Hollywood figure long on good looks and short on common sense.