As part of my research I read Dostoevsky's Demons, which tells the story of a fictional town consumed by chaos when it becomes the launchpad of an attempted revolution led by a master manipulator named Pyotr Verkhovensky. The novel portrays characters who seem to be possessed by demons.

I also read The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov, which tells the story of Satan visiting the Soviet Union. Only years later did I learn that the book inspired Mick Jagger to write "Sympathy for the Devil" with the terrifying verses:

Stuck around St. Petersburg
When I saw it was a time for a change
Killed Tsar and his ministers
Anastasia screamed in vain

I rode a tank
Held a general's rank
When the blitzkrieg raged
And the bodies stank

I recently thought of these verses—as well as Dostoevsky's Demons—as I read Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them), by Jack Posobiec, Joshua Lisec, Stephen K. Bannon. The authors make a pretty good case that the people historically known as "revolutionaries" or "communists" are best understood NOT by the ideological doctrine they espouse, but by the emotions they harbor—namely, resentment, a sense of grievance, and a desire to destroy institutions and people. As they see it, the fact that communist revolutionaries have murdered tens of millions of people is a feature and not a bug of their approach to the world.

Readers already familiar with the blood-soaked history of the French and Russian Revolutions will not be surprised by the authors' accounts of these episodes. They also present vivid and detailed accounts the Spanish Civil War, the Chinese Civil War and Cultural Revolution, and America's 1960s Revolution and Culture War.