ean McMeekin is a historian perhaps best known for his revisionist accounts of the Russian Revolution and World War II. He’s not afraid of a challenge. Nevertheless, while his thought-provoking new book, To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism, is well worth reading, it does not quite deliver — presumably, in part, for reasons of space — on the immense promise implicit in its subtitle. Moreover, the second “rise” of communism (if that’s what it is) turns out to be far from its second coming, which would otherwise be a not inappropriate phrase to use. Even in the secular form it has taken since Karl Marx’s time, communism is a religion in all but name, and one with obvious millenarian overtones…