The brutal lynching of Mashal Khan, a 23 year old student of journalism in Abdul Wali Khan University, by a fundamentalist mob is a new and shocking example of the reign of terror that is being waged against left-wing and progressive forces in Pakistan. Even by the barbaric standards of fundamentalist violence, this murder was characterised by its extreme savagery. Dragged from his hostel room, Mashal Khan was battered with wooden planks before being shot dead. Not satisfied by this butchery, those cowardly murderers then proceeded to desecrate and humiliate his dead body.

When the Russian Revolution broke out in early 1917, Vladimir Ilych Ulyanov – better known as Lenin – the leader of the Bolshevik faction of the RSDLP, was exiled in Zurich, Switzerland. As the first reports arrived of these extraordinary events, Lenin’s excitement was coupled with exasperation that he himself was separated from them by thousands of miles. “I am beside myself that I cannot go to Scandinavia!!” he complained bitterly, in a letter to his friend Inessa Armand. “I will not forgive myself for not risking the journey in 1915!”