| 01 December 2004 | Wednesday | 18 Shawwal 1425 |
Old cars, old memories
NGOs role in education
A forgotten turning point
The post-9/11 world has witnessed unprecedented erosion in the role, authority and credibility of the UN. Today, the UN is no longer a meaningful arbiter on issues of global relevance and importance.
Washington, not New York, is the focus of world attention for actual decision-making on these issues. Countries and leaders are increasingly looking towards the US for support and succour in their domestic and external problems.
Unfortunately, the problems of the world are aggravating. There is no let-up in violence and the causes that breed violence and hatred. The war on terror has not gone beyond retribution and retaliation.
The root causes of global conflicts and malaise remain un addressed. The humanity finds itself divided on religious lines. Might seen wrong by all has never been claimed so "right". Dialogue among civilizations is almost dead. Iraq is still burning. Afghanistan has yet to breathe peace.
There is no prospect of long-festering issues coming to their just and final end. Inter-state conflicts and intra-state implosions continue to cause terrible human suffering and misery. The global development agenda has been set aside, if not shelved.
The UN has never been so helpless and ineffective in meeting its Charter obligations. Its role has been circumvented by the unabashed use of power. The new unipolarity has brought ominous effect on the role and relevance of the UN leaving very little to be addressed meaningfully through multilateral approach.
Today's UN is no more than a debating club, producing voluminous and repetitive documentation without any tangible results or follow-up action. By all accounts, it is today the largest consumer of printing paper and also the largest producer of waste paper. No wonder, some critics now like to see it as "a dustbin of history".
The UN Security Council, responsible under the Charter for maintenance of international peace and security, has never lived up to its obligations with the veto-wielding powers controlling its reins only to secure their own "vested" interests. But today, it is even worse. The Security Council is left with no role in preventing conflicts or resolving disputes. Its deliberations are conducted in a theatrical manner through stage-managed debates and choreographed scenarios.
Transparency and legality are no longer the norm in the Council's proceedings. In its open meetings, member states are heard not listened to. Its decisions on critical issues are made either in Washington DC or reached behind closed doors among the P-5 in the ante-rooms of the Council's chamber.
To keep other members "preoccupied", an excursionist (and deviationist) culture has been developed involving frequent "missions" to conflict areas across the globe (not Kashmir or Palestine) at high travel and per diem costs.
To dilute its role on issues of global peace and security, there could not be a cleverer way than flooding the Council with too many peripheral issues. Instead of concentrating on its own area of primary responsibility, i.e. the issues of peace and security, the Council is more than often holding "thematic" non-consequential debates on such issues as small arms, WMD, HIV/Aids, children in conflicts, women combatants, refugees, human trafficking, narcotics, environment, economic and social issues such as poverty, hunger, disease, food security, organized crime, etc.
These are very important issues but they belong to the jurisdiction of other UN bodies which are addressing them in accordance with their own mandates. By stretching the scope of its responsibilities beyond its charter role and engaging itself in too many areas, the Council is doing justice neither to its mandate nor to that of the really concerned bodies.
In his annual reports during the last two years, Secretary General Kofi Annan has been depicting the gravity of contemporary challenges while urging the need for "radical reform" of the UN to make it more capable of meeting those challenges. No doubt, the events of the last two years have immeasurably shaken the international system which is no longer governed by rules, laws, values and cooperation.
The secretary-general rightly urged the member states to take a "hard look" at the existing architecture of international institutions and judge whether these were adequate enough to meet the global challenges.
On his own part, he established, in November 2003, a 16-member high-level panel comprising eminent persons of stature and experience to examine the gravity of the current and future threats to global peace and security and to identify the changes and measures needed to strengthen the existing multilateral institutions and processes.
What now remains to be seen is the extent to which the panel has been able to assert its "collective" wisdom and rise above the respective national positions of its members in seeking to redress the flaws of the existing multilateral system.
It is hoped the panel was able to extricate itself from the deep-rooted culture of "power and expediency" and would be making a strong case for "bold and radical "reform in the UN system. Half-baked approach and compromise formulas will not bring the real change in the existing multilateral mechanisms and processes that the UN needs to manage global issues of peace and development.
While the world awaits the panel's assessment on the whole range of global challenges, there is very little prospect of an early inter-governmental consensus emerging on its recommendations in critical areas of concern to most countries, including Pakistan. These include UN Security Council reform, criteria for use of force, nuclear non-proliferation, WMD threats and terrorism.
With growing complexity and magnitude of global challenges including recurrent threats to and breach of international peace and security, the disillusionment and despair over the UN's capacity to manage these challenges is increasing.
If the UN of the 21st century is to be prevented from meeting the fate of its predecessor, the League of Nations, its "structure and culture" will have to be adapted to the realities and challenges of today's changed world.
This warrants an attitudinal change on the part of the governments and states which, instead of indulging in meaningless and ritualistic annual debates and sterile rhetoric, must take decisive steps to restore the UN's credibility and authority as an effective instrument of international legitimacy.
Unilateral armed intervention under any pretext is a breach of moral and multilateral norms. The use or threat of use of force itself constitutes a threat to international peace and security.
No country, however powerful or dominant, should resort to pre-emptive use of force unless it is authorized by the Security Council within the scope of Articles 42 and 51 of the UN Charter. Collective action based on collective interest should be the only legal option which must be pursued under the aegis of the UN Security Council.
The UN needs reform that would make it stronger, more representative and more effective inter-governmental organization. The democratic principles of "sovereign equality and one-state-one-vote" should be accepted as the basis of its strength and participatory character.
This would require restoration of the primacy of the General Assembly as the chief policy-making organ of the UN and democratization of the UN Security Council to enable them acquit their Charter role in pursuit of global peace and development.
The General Assembly with its universal character and authority must be involved in all decisions of global relevance and impact, including the appointment of the secretary-general.
In cases where the Security Council is prevented from acting effectively, the General Assembly should be able to operate under "Uniting for Peace" authority and adopt mandatory resolutions concerning global peace and security.
The reform of Security Council would not be an easy task. It is a complex issue and has been the subject of protracted discussions at the UN for over a decade now. The vast majority of the UN membership would like to see the Security Council democratized through comprehensive reform encompassing its enlargement, decision-making including the question of the veto and the Council's working methods.
There is a consensus on the increase in the non-permanent category of its membership to make it more broadly representative of the international community as a whole and of the geopolitical realities of the contemporary world.
The overwhelming majority of the UN members, as reflected in the official NAM position, are against expansion in the permanent category. Similarly, there is strong opposition to the continuation of the veto power which is considered anachronistic to the Charter's principle of sovereign equality of states.
Both the permanent membership and veto power, remnants of World War II, negate the principles of democracy and sovereign equality. An ideal solution would be the abolition of both the anomalies which only represent the vestiges of power and privilege. But in today's world, there is no scope for ideal solutions. The current veto-wielding powers will not give up their "veto power", nor permit any move for abolition of their permanent status.
There is a growing demand for making the Council more representative of the current UN membership. An expansion in both categories is now indispensable. The NAM position that increase be made only in the non-permanent category is no longer tenable as more than 120 member states of the UN which obviously include a large number of NAM countries during this year's GA plenary session called for expansion in both categories.
The panel is likely to propose an increase of nine additional members in the Council with varied alternatives for their allocation to different categories. Some kind of criteria would also be proposed to select or elect the new permanent or "semi-permanent" (renewable long-term) members.
Instead of relying on the political, economic and military size and clout of the aspirants, it would be best to leave their selection to the regional groups which should be asked to present their respective "clean slates" for the permanent or semi-permanent category. In case a regional group fails to reach agreement on its nomination, the seat should go for open vote in the UN General Assembly.
Any suggestion to create a new category of "veto-less" permanent members would make a mockery of the Security Council and the UN Charter. If the veto power cannot be rescinded altogether, let the new permanent or semi-permanent members also wield it.
The use of this prerogative should, in any case, be rationalized by subjecting it to at least two concomitant negative votes of non-permanent members or one-fifth of whatever is the revised number of elected members and restricting its application only to Chapter VII decisions.
Pakistan has been spearheading a campaign under the aegis of the so-called "Coffee-Club" against creation of new centres of privilege or expansion of the existing oligarchy at the cost of equitable representation.
This campaign also needs to be brought to a logical conclusion in close collaboration with other like-minded countries lest the current winds of change blow away its mast.
The writer is a former foreign secretary.
Old cars, old memories
There was a time when motor cars were a luxury for those accustomed to moving about on horseback or tongas. I was too small to remember, but I have a photograph of my father, a canal engineer in Punjab, going off on tour on his horse, with his luggage strapped on to a camel's back. The camel man was called "shutar sawar" and also acted as messenger and dak runner.
The automobile industry developed very fast, and soon motor cars became a utility and then a necessity. My father's first was an Overland, bought in 1919, long before I was born. The purchase was delayed by World War I when the fledgling auto industry only produced military vehicles.
Our second was a Dodge. I was in primary school then and the only memory of that is of my elder brother starting it when it was in gear and bringing the rear wall of the garage down on its bonnet. He still carries a scar on his upper lip. But I do vividly remember the maroon Plymouth that followed and Mother sacrificing a goat to celebrate the event.
I have mentioned the colour of the Plymouth purposely. For nearly thirty years after that, up to the sixties, cars were always in dark colours and never white, while a yellow one was unthinkable.
If you walk on the road today you'll find that 80 per cent of all cars are white or off-white. I saw my first white car in 1945 when my father took a job in Junagadh state where the heir-apparent's magnificent white Packard was a dazzling sight. It was my dream car!
Before father retired from service in 1939, we were in Sargodha where my eldest brother had got a job. He saved enough in a few months to buy a second hand two-seater Baby Morris for six hundred rupees.
Its dicky opened up to provide seats for another two. We all treated it as a toy. The same year, my father gave a new Ford V-8 to my sister on her wedding. According to his diary that he left with me, it cost Rs. 6,840 which was less than 1/200 of its present price.
Father didn't know the ABC of business. After doing sundry jobs on retirement, and settling down in Model Town, Lahore, he was talked into investing in a motor workshop.
The project was a complete disaster, for his mechanics diddled him all the time. From the workshop's ruins the only complete item retrieved was a 1936 model Austin Ten which he handed over to me. What a gift! In my salary at that time I could hardly afford the petrol, so my friends and I used to pool our resources to keep it running for collective use.
The car was always giving trouble, so I took it to a friendly mechanic. He found that, contrary to the assurances of my father's foreman that the engine had been overhauled, no such thing had been done, and not even the piston rings had been changed.
On the friendly mechanic's suggestion I "sold" the car to him. There was no down payment. Rather, he was to pay me fifty rupees every month from the piecemeal sale of its flesh and bones in the Data Darbar market for used auto spare parts. It is said about this market that you can assemble a Rolls Royce from the scrap available there.
A delightful memory is of another very old Baby Morris owned by a dear friend in the fifties and left with him by a departing Hindu at partition. I used to spend my weekends with his family in Model Town, and come back to my job on Monday morning in that rickety thing.
Because of faulty tyres it ran in a rather zigzag fashion. This reminded us of Kamini Kaushal's movements in the Indian movie "Nadiya ke Paar," so we christened it after her. we must have pushed Kamini Kaushal miles and miles. It was a very light car and riding it was fun most of the time.
In 1950, after a short stint in Dawn, I joined the Punjab Information Department. Here transport was provided even to junior officers because of their duties involving official reporting, and work was inconceivable without staff cars. I must admit that the most honest of us did occasionally misuse them, though not to the extent that you see now in the federal and provincial governments.
With a staff car always at my disposal, my first privately-owned car came late in life. It was a Fiat 124, a much-used thing, that I got cheap in Islamabad. What I liked about it was its commodious boot useful for family travel.
When I bought it I was impressed by the fact that the dashboard was covered with expensive-looking fur, till a mechanic discovered that the fur had been laid on to hide the effects of a bad accident.
In 1977 I invested in a reconditioned Toyota Corolla, till then not as coveted as it is now. The most excited was my elder daughter who, then fourteen, travelled with me to Karachi to drive the car back to Islamabad.
The journey was uneventful, except that in Multan, instead of putting up with a family friend as arranged, she insisted on staying the night in a hotel because, as she put it, she must see a hotel from inside. Accustomed to accommodation paid for by the government, I still rue the bill which was more than the entire petrol expense of the journey.
A memorable phase of my experience with staff cars came when I was working with the Wafaqi Mohtasib where I had a brand new Toyota Corolla for office use. This joyride came to an end when PM Muhammad Khan Junejo decided that officers of my level could not use anything higher than 800 cc, so we were "demoted" to the small Suzuki.
And then came the time when, finally calling it a day in 1988 after an assortment of jobs, I had to buy a Suzuki FX of my own. I had what is called a "chor switch" put in at once, because if that car was stolen my financial position would have obliged me to come down to a bicycle, leaving the family to fend for themselves as best as they could. I am glad to say the Suzuki is still going strong, and is definitely destined to be the last in my odyssey of automobiles.
NGOs role in education
The gravity of the education crisis is indeed mind-boggling. If one were to only identify the problems that need to be addressed in this area, the list would be unending. It includes the standard of pedagogy and the quality of curricula and textbooks.
Similarly, there are as many solutions and strategies that are offered. The managers of private schools, especially the elite ones, feel they could perform very well if they were left to run their institutions as they wished. They believe that the government would do better to mind its own schools and improve their performance.
There is an element of truth in this. But how does one induce the education department to do its work? There are also numerous NGOs and trusts which are working at the grassroots level and trying to take education to the masses.
They do not have the clout to work outside the framework set by the government and get away with it. Neither do they have the financial resources to invest in their schools because the people they serve cannot afford to pay the kind of fees the elite schools charge.
As a result, these organizations which are mainly running schools in the rural areas are constantly facing problems. Although they are doing good work in their limited fields, these civil society organizations feel they are not making any impact on the national scene because of the magnitude of the problem and their limited capacity.
Small wonder, despondency is setting in. It is increasingly being recognized that in the final analysis only the state has the capacity and the resources to impart education to children at the primary level.
So it is the state which must be made to shoulder its responsibilities. It should also be held accountable when it fails to perform, whether it is due to lack of political will or on account of corruption.
A state which boasts of good governance and a democratic system, has in-built mechanism to ensure that it is not negligent towards its basic responsibilities. The opposition in the parliament acts like a watchdog and steps up pressure on the government to put its act together.
Society itself is enlightened enough to know what is going wrong and where, and can demand corrective measures, while an independent judiciary can always take care of the corrupt.
But that is not the case in Pakistan. With all our political institutions in bad shape, there is no one within the system or outside it to protect the rights of the child. The apathy is appalling.
The fact is that only the powerful can demand and win their rights and privileges. The poor have no voice and even if they know what their rights are, they are not empowered to achieve them. Besides, the biggest tool which can help them in their struggle for empowerment - education - is denied to them leaving them helpless.
Seen against this backdrop, it is a welcome move that some professionals, educationists and activists concerned with education for the poor have decided to join hands in a "coalition" to force the government to shoulder its responsibility.
Sadiqa Salahuddin, the managing director of the Indus Resource Centre which runs 114 schools in the interior of Sindh, points out that individually she and others like her carry no weight.
It is not easy for her to get the government to change a policy or provide funds for her projects. But collectively she and other organizations with similar problems can make their voices heard.
Funded by the Commonwealth Education Fund, this coalition which will, in a month, be convened at the national level may be left high and dry when the CEF winds up in 2007. In the past, many such groupings that began with a bang ended with a whimper since they couldn't be sustained.
But in this case one has high hopes. For one, the coalition for education comprises such committed and determined members who have already been working for quite a few years in localities like Qasba, Orangi and the low-income areas of Sindh. They have been running into problems of a similar kind. They rightly feel that jointly they will be able to make an impact.
At a meeting that was held last month quite a few educationists, teachers trainers, people involved in research on education, curriculum development donors and writers, decided to set up a coalition of the stakeholders to engage the government. It was rightly pointed out that the government is a signatory to a number of international documents that commit it to meet the goals laid down.
There is the Jomtien declaration of 1990 and the Dakar Framework of 2000 which make it obligatory on the signatories to provide education to all children. The Millennium Development Goals (MDG) adopted at the turn of the century and to which Pakistan is also a signatory also lays down similar educational goals. But there is no mechanism to hold the government accountable for its lapses.
The coalition is to help the country achieve the key education goals enshrined in the MDG, namely, universal primary education by 2015 and elimination of gender disparity in this field. The coalition members pledged to work for these goals through lobbying, policy dialogues, networking, and awareness raising.
The knowledge and experience of the participants who attended the meeting were remarkable. Together they are running about 2,000 schools in Sindh and can identify the problems and suggest solutions.
While prioritizing the issues, they emphatically lamented the problem of poor quality. The fact is that if this issue could be addressed seriously, it would resolve many of the other problems too. The dropout rate would fall, and the enrolment rate would rise. Of course to improve quality a multidimensional approach is needed.
Thus, teachers training, curricula reform and the development of textbooks would have to be taken care of. None of these are easy matters to deal with effectively mainly because action in these areas means treading on the toes of numerous vested interests. These issues have been politicized as the recent furore on curriculum reform aptly demonstrated.
The success of such measures would depend on the leadership and the willingness of its members to accommodate one another's point of views and not duplicate their work.
If those who are initiating this move remain committed to their goals the coalition for education should not be a short-lived phenomenon. Its priorities and focus would change as some success is achieved in one area. Its strategy may also shift. But its importance will never diminish because primary education will always be a sector of national importance.
A forgotten turning point
The sun may already have set by the time the regional head of the Communist Party reached the Smolny Institute in Leningrad on a cold winter afternoon exactly 70 years ago.
December 1, 1934, was a Saturday, and Sergei Mironovich Kirov wasn't expected to turn up at the party headquarters. But he was preparing a speech for a meeting that evening and probably needed to consult some files at his workplace.
Kirov had been born and brought up in extreme poverty. His family had struggled to put him through school. But he shone as a pupil, received a scholarship and as a teenager became embroiled in revolutionary politics. By 1905, at the age of 19, he joined the Bolsheviks.
His activities as an agitator landed him in prison more than once and he eventually ended up in Vladikavkaz, in the Transcaucasus - not far from Beslan, which was the scene earlier this year of a horrific school massacre. There he thrived as a journalist for a local liberal newspaper.
After the revolution, he showed his mettle as an administrator and a soldier, helping to bring nearby Georgia into the Soviet fold and using a mixture of military might and conciliatory tactics to subdue the ethnically diverse Caucasian tribes.
Kirov was subsequently appointed as the party chief in troubled Azerbaijan, where he once more demonstrated his ability to combine ruthlessness with a willingness to compromise.
During the Transcaucasian phase of his career, the rising star forged a close and lasting friendship with Communist Party luminary Sergo Ordzhonikidze. Sergo and Sergei respected each other's intellectual independence - a trait that never sat too well with Josef Stalin.
Nevertheless, by 1926 the party and state supremo had sufficient confidence in Kirov's ability and loyalty to offer him a more pivotal role in running the Soviet Union.
Stalin had never been too fond of Leningrad: the cradle of the revolution was too European for his liking, and he construed its vibrant intellectual culture as a threat.
Worse still, the local party was dominated by supporters of Grigory Zinoviev - a close comrade of Vladimir Lenin who had flip-flopped between an alliance with and antagonism towards Stalin. Two years after Lenin's death, Stalin felt strong enough to bring the Leningrad organization to heel. And he picked Kirov as his instrument.
Kirov was a reluctant recruit for the task, not because of any deficiencies in the revolutionary zeal department, but because his preferred method of settling disagreements among communists was persuasion rather than purges, and he knew that Stalin was likely to disapprove. But it wasn't an offer he could refuse.
So Kirov moved to Leningrad, where he managed to put his stamp on the party without the degree of unpleasantness a more rigid leader might have generated. He rose in the party hierarchy and grew closer to Stalin - they spoke regularly on the telephone and often vacationed together.
Kirov maintained a high level of anti-Zinovievite rhetoric at party gatherings, but his preferred mode of dealing with dissidents was to try and lure them back into the Bolshevik fold. Similarly, when overseeing tasks such as the requisition of crops from starving peasants, he tended to avoid authorizing repressive tactics.
He was nonetheless complicit in many of the crimes of the early Stalinist era. All leading members of the state apparatus (which progressively became indistinguishable from the Party structure) were guilty to some extent of indefensible measures employed in cementing the building blocks of totalitarianism.
But the worst was yet to come, and the intriguing question in this context is, how long would the likes of Kirov and Ordzhonikidze have persisted in refusing to challenge Stalin's blueprint for the USSR?
In keeping with the mood - and directives - of the day, Kirov was fairly vocal in his criticism of Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev and Nikolai Bukharin. It doesn't necessarily follow, though, that he would have been prepared to collude in their murder.
This is what distinguishes him from others who were close to Stalin - the likes of Kliment Voroshilov, Vyacheslav Molotov and Anastas Mikoyan, who wouldn't have dreamt of disagreeing with their leader under any circumstances.
The dictator was aware of this, and it wasn't the sort of difference he, of all people, would have been willing to overlook. His distrust deepened in early 1934, following the 17th congress of the Communist Party.
On the face of it, Stalin was at the pinnacle of his power and virtually every speech at the congress - including Kirov's - contained a paean to the Great Leader. Even supposed foes offered unstinted praise for Stalin and abased themselves through self-criticism. But the congress also involved elections to the central committee. It was a fairly safe process: there were as many candidates as there were seats on the committee, and there was a separate ballot paper for each candidate, which could be marked yes or no.
After the secret balloting among the 1225 delegates ended, the election commission discovered that whereas there were only three votes against Kirov, there were nearly 300 against Stalin.
Such a revolt was unprecedented, and the matter was referred to the boss himself, who decreed that all but three of the ballots against him be destroyed, so that he would appear to be at least as popular as Kirov. All the same, the result was never announced to the congress and the truth only emerged decades later.
Stalin, meanwhile, must also have been aware that in secret discussions on the sidelines of the congress, some delegates were expressing the opinion that it was time to replace him as party general secretary - as Lenin had recommended shortly before his death 10 years earlier. For many the preferred successor was Kirov, but when Kirov was approached, he dismissed the suggestion out of hand.
Relations between Stalin and Kirov did not markedly deteriorate in the aftermath of the 17th congress. But they were more wary of each other. The two leaders vacationed that summer, but in letters to his wife Kirov betrayed an unsettled state of mind.
Back to that winter's afternoon at the Smolny building, and as Kirov made his way through the corridor that led to his third-floor office, a shot rang out. Then another. Wounded in the back of the neck, Kirov died almost immediately.
As soon as Stalin learnt of the murder, he gathered his entourage and took a train to Leningrad, where he personally launched an investigation. The shot had apparently been fired by a disaffected former junior apparatchik, Leonid Nikolaev.
It didn't take long for the matter to be resolved: Nikolaev, it was announced, was part of a vast Zinovievite-Trotskyite conspiracy to destabilize the nation and overthrow the party. Arrests began almost immediately; Nikolaev was executed within days, and Zinoviev and Kamenev received long prison sentences.
The matter didn't end there. Kirov's assassination provided the basis for a wholesale purge of the party and the state security apparatus. In subsequent show trials, the conspiracy to kill Kirov featured prominently in indictments against Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin and Karl Radek.
They were all shot dead. Ordzhonikidze (apparently) committed suicide. By the time a hired Spanish assassin stuck a pickaxe into the exiled Leon Trotsky's head in 1940, virtually every member of Lenin's central committee was dead. There was only one survivor.
Stalin's murderous urges were not restricted to communists, but it's crucial to remember that his millions of victims included the cream of the party membership - and leadership.
There can be no doubt that he used Kirov's murder for ends that justified Trotsky's description of him as "the gravedigger of the revolution". But was it a convenient coincidence, or did he also arrange the hit against Kirov?
Historians disagree on this, and those who point the finger of blame at Stalin - including Roy Medvedev, Dmitri Volkogonov and Amy Knight (whose fascinating Who Killed Kirov? was written after the party archives became accessible) - are supported only by circumstantial evidence. But this evidence is fairly compelling, ranging from discrepancies in eyewitness accounts and other testimony to unexplained omissions and even killings. There may be no smoking gun, but Stalin clearly had both the motive and the opportunity.
The Kirov case was re-examined twice in the Khrushchev era, once during the neo-Stalinist Brezhnev phase, and once more under Mikhail Gorbachev. Details of the findings have never been made public, although Zinoviev, Kamenev and others were exonerated by the final investigation.
Does any of this matter now? Would it not have made more sense to devote today's column to an examination of the gripping events in Ukraine - a sharp reminder, if one were needed, that the Soviet Union is dead and gone? But that, perhaps, is precisely the point. It is fashionable nowadays to dismiss the Bolshevik revolution and its aftermath as an unrelieved 20th-century tragedy, and thereby to bury without discrimination all the ideas and thought-currents that fed into it, even though - or perhaps precisely because - quite a few of them could pose a potent challenge to the corporate imperialism of the 21st century.
That is why the trend must be resisted. And it is interesting to consider how Soviet - and world - history would have been affected had the party been courageous enough, even as late as 1934, to dispense with Stalin's services and, if nothing more, at least return to the democratic centralism of the revolution's first phase.
Email: mahirali2@netscape.net.