4 SOCIAL SCIENTIST organization', but it was very unfair to PCJ and to the prevailing ambience. I am unhappy it hurt PCJ, disorienting him for quite some time though he persistently served the cause till his last breath. A certain pathos pertains thus to the life of this brilliant person, youngest of the accused in the Meerut Conspiracy Case (1929-33), who could not emerge to heights he might have scaled. The French philosopher Merleau-Ponty once gibed that Communism demanded 'un oui trop massifet charneV ('a "yes" to massive and heartfelt'), perhaps with a little envy at its entrancing call to dedication. Marxism, being human, cannot be without taint and propensity to pitfalls, but, proudly, the universe is its province, its Weltanschauung all-embracing. Firm in its basic tenets and flexible on a principled basis, while facing problems and predicaments thrown up by History's 'cunning' (in Marx's stose), Communism bent on changing our world has faced challenges over the last 150 years, encountering defeats but shaking the earth, as it were, and 'storming the heavens'—Great October (1917), the seven Soviet decades, the monumental victory over fascism (1945) that had been fostered and fed by 'democracy'— mouthing imperialism, the 40-year phenomenon after 1945 of one-third of the globe run on the lines of the rather infelicitously termed 'real, existing socialism'. Expectations thus arose of facile advance towards world liberation, darkly shrouded at the moment and nearly shattered by Counter-Revolution, no less, with a big C. This is an eclipse, necessarily short-lived, but one cannot be sure how long and excruciating the interval would be. Like so many others, I have felt flabbergasted (bouleverse as the French would put it) by the events of 1987-89 Mikhail Gorbachev's initially innocuous call for 'perestroika1, 'glasnost' etc. and with sly demagogy, 'for Socialism, More Socialism, Always Socialism', hiding with a sort of jargon-free, if garrulous elegance, the vile aim of 'contriving' the 'annihilation' of socialism (as Fidel Castro has put it). The cat came out of the bag when in August, 1991, after a dubious 'coup', Gorbachev was outplayed by Boris Yeltsin and no longer needed by 'western' patrons who had amply rewarded his treachery and found a more malleable villain. In a book The August Coup (HarperCollins, 1991) Gorbachev solemnly solaced himself: 1 made my choice long ago. ... My mission in fulfilled.' It is noxious to recall such calumny and see how the Soviets' epic effort for 'the remaking of man' as the main aim of socialism has faltered and failed. In terms of real life, it was not implausible, though by no means desirable, for a Gorbachev to have climbed the political ladder, but what must have come over Lenin's Party that lumbering louts like Yeltsin could be in its Politburo, with countless others doubtless in tow! How grievous has been this human failure—and how initiated and extended in the Soviet Party with 19 million members, it is difficult to imagine!