Centralized Command Research Articles

Covid-19: temporal evolution and immunization in the three epidemiological waves, Brazil, 2020-2022.

Describe the temporal evolution of morbimortality due to Covid-19 and vaccination coverage during the health emergency in Brazil. Number of cases and deaths due to Covid-19 were extracted from the public panel of the Brazilian Ministry of Health, according to epidemiological week (EW) and geographic region. Data on vaccines and variants were obtained, respectively, from the Information System of the National Immunization Program and the Genomic Surveillance System of SARS-CoV-2. Three peaks of deaths characterized the evolution of the Covid-19 pandemic: in EW 30 of 2020, in the EW 14 of 2021 and in the EW six of 2022; three case waves, starting in the North and Northeast regions, with higher rates in the third wave, mainly in the South region. Vaccination started in the epidemiological week three of 2021, rapidly reaching most of the population, particularly in the Southeast and South regions, coinciding with a reduction exclusively in the mortality rate in the third wave. Only from the beginning of the second wave, when Gama was the dominant variant, 146,718 genomes were sequenced. From the last EW of 2021, with vaccination coverage already approaching 70%, the Omicron variant caused an avalanche of cases, but with fewer deaths. We noticed the presence of three waves of Covid-19, as well as the effect of immunization on the reduction of mortality in the second and third waves, attributed to the Delta and Omicron variants, respectively. However, the reduction of morbidity, which peaked in the third wave during the domination of the Omicron variant, remained the same. The national and centralized command of the pandemic confrontation did not occur; thus, public administrators took the lead in their territories. The overwhelming effect of the pandemic could have been minimized, if there had been a coordinated participation of three spheres of the Brazilian Unified Health System administration, in the joint governance of the pandemic fight.

Research on threat assessment problems of island air defence system based on the leader-follower model

Abstract To study the command and control system in an island air defence system under the background of systemic conflict, this paper proposes a new modelling method based on the opinion dynamics leader-follower model to simulate the target threat assessment process in the command and control activities. Through example simulation, it is obtained that in a centralised command and control system, a command post (CP)-led model can provide the most accurate threat assessment results, but it consumes a longer time. While in a distributed command and control system, a model without a leader can provide a target threat value accurately and quickly. The consistency of simulation results and actual situation indicates that, at present, under a high degree of battlefield information sharing, it is necessary to down-pass the authority of the CP to improve operational efficiency. In summary, the proposed model can comprehensively reflect the process that the island air defence system assesses the threat of an attacking target, and it gives a new idea for investigating the command and control procedure and system of the island air defence system.

The "Societalization" of pandemic unpreparedness: lessons from Taiwan's COVID response.

Adopting a Civil Sphere Theory framework, we argue that Taiwan’s efforts at containing COVID-19 resulted from its “societalization” of pandemic unpreparedness, which was triggered by the 2003 SARS outbreak and resumed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Societalization refers to the process through which institutional failures are transformed into societal crises, with the civil sphere mobilized to discuss institutional dysfunctions, push for reforms, and attempt to democratize or otherwise transform institutional cultures. The societalization of pandemic unpreparedness in Taiwan led to reforms of the public health administration and the medical profession, thereby establishing state mechanisms for encouraging early responses and coordinating centralized command during outbreaks, and healthcare infrastructures for coordinating patient transfer and ensuring supplies of personal protective equipment. Reflections upon past uncivil acts among citizens motivated the civil sphere to foster a discourse of interdependence, redefining the boundaries between individual choices and civic virtues. Meanwhile, unaddressed challenges remained, including threats related to Taiwan’s political polarization. Our paper challenges the thesis of “authoritarian advantage,” highlighting how democratic societies can foster social preparedness to respond to crises. By illustrating how societalization can reach temporary closures but become reactivated subsequently, our study extends the theory of societalization by explicating its historical dimension.

Centralized command and coalition victory

Building upon research that found that coalitions are more likely to win wars, recent work has sought to differentiate effective from ineffective coalitions. Much of this work focuses on characteristics of member states and not the coalition itself. This paper takes a first step in exploring how the structure of a coalition contributes to its performance. Specifically, coalitions vary in how much control members must transfer to the coalition. Some coalitions form weak command structures with states maintaining primary control while other coalitions form a strong centralized command. The impact of command structure on coalition performance is vital to understanding the success and failure of coalitions. Highly centralized command structures allow states to overcome the problems associated with coalition warfare and achieve victory. Empirical evidence supports this claim; the odds of victory increase as states surrender more control to the coalition. These findings provide direct advice to policy makers considering forming a coalition. The implications of this research extend to the alliance literature and the war bargaining literature, which tend to assume either that wars are dyadic or that states can seamlessly aggregate military capabilities.

Retrofitting low-cost heating ventilation and air-conditioning systems for energy management in buildings

Developing countries such as Pakistan are experiencing severe energy crises because of an increasing difference between energy demand and energy production. Since buildings are the major consumers of energy in Pakistan, immediate steps must be taken to reduce energy consumption by devising energy efficient measures for buildings. The majority of buildings in the country use distributed heating/cooling devices, i.e., air conditioners (A/Cs), to regulate building temperature. These A/Cs consume most of the energy in the buildings and are often subjected to problems such as heating or cooling unoccupied spaces and overheating/overcooling some areas in the building. These problems arise mainly because of independent manual controls of A/Cs and can be addressed by installing centralized heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems. However, the cost of deploying an actual HVAC system in these buildings remains high. Costs are associated with disruption to occupants as well as the dollar cost of installing the HVAC infrastructure. Moreover, the cost associated with removal or replacement of the existing A/C units is also substantial. Therefore, in this work, we abstract the functionality of the HVAC system by using the existing distributed heating/cooling infrastructure in buildings to provide a low-cost centralized command and control mechanism namely Retrofitting low-cost Heating Ventilation and Air-Conditioning (RetroHVAC) system. We designed an occupancy detection system and incorporated it into the RetroHVAC system to enhance its energy-saving potential. Additionally, a desktop application was designed to enable user interaction and policy enforcement. Experimental evaluation comparing different RetroHVAC control strategies based on time scheduling, temperature threshold monitoring, and real-time occupancy information show that the RetroHVAC system can substantially reduce the building energy consumption without compromising user comfort.

Centralized Web Application Firewall Security System

In this paper we propose a centralized web firewall system for web application security which will provide a new type of synchronized system, which has the ability to  detect  and prevent a variety of web application attacks for a wide range of hosts at the same time , using an centralized command and control system, the attacked client then sends the information to a centralized command and control server which will distribute the attack information to all of the integrated clients connected to it. The distributed information contains all of the attack information including the type of attack, the IP address of the attacker, and the time of attack. The process of receiving the attacker's information and distributing it through the centralized web firewall is done automatically and immediately at the time of the attack. And all of the receiving clients will take actions against the threat depending on the distributed information such as banning the IP address of the attacker. The main process aims to protect multiple clients from any possible attack from the same attacker or the same type of attack. The system has been implemented to protect a real web application. Experiments showed that the attacks has been successfully prevented on multiple hosts at the time.
 
 This paper came to provide a centralized web firewall system that connect different web firewalls in order to detect and prevent different types of web attacks and work as a fully integrated system with the different clients.

A flow analysis and preemption framework for periodic traffic in an SDN network

SummarySoftware Defined Networking (SDN) utilises the concept of centralised command and control to significantly improve network manageability. However, this is at the expense of performance, with the controller(s) now being a bottleneck. This paper further develops the authors' concept of using a Preemptive Flow Installation Mechanism (PFIM) to improve SDN performance for periodic traffic by limiting the number of controller look‐ups through predicting when a flow is likely to need a particular rule. Unlike previous work in this area, the paper uses real SDN hardware and a series of experiments containing varying amounts of temporally predictable and random flows, along with a modified version of the POX controller. The work goes on to discuss issues found pairing the controller with hardware, before presenting results that demonstrate that the system can detect majority of temporally periodic flows and preemptively install a flow rule, facilitating the performance comparable to layer two switching speeds. The paper also suggests that the performance of the modified controller is approximately equivalent to the unmodified version when dealing with non‐periodic traffic.

True Federalism and Restructuring in Nigeria: Challenges and the Way Forward

The basic minimal structures required for a country to lay claims to the practice of federalism include a political system in which there is power sharing under a written constitution with a government consisting of at least two orders: a central or federal government and the governments of the constituent units. Each order of government receives an allocation of financial resources tailored to their specific requirements. Nigeria has been a federal state since 1954, yet even this basic requirement of federalism has not been attained in the Nigerian federalism especially in line with the postulations of Professor KC Wheare.. This paper discusses restructuring and Nigeria’s political development with emphasis on the need for a review of the present governance and political structure to allow for practice of true federalism as it were. The argument is that the long years of military rule virtually annihilated tenets of federalism as the state was administered as a unitary state in consonance with military centralized command and authority structure. In place of a system where federating units ought to independent and coordinate and the federating units contributing parts of their sovereignty to a central authority, we have is a scenario where the federating units are agents of the central government dependent on it for survival. The implication therefore is that instead of operating as co-equals, the federation is run as a unitary state against the tenets of federalism as put forward by Wheare (1964). This has led to series to political logjam, constitutional crises and litigations which has threatened the political and economic stability of the Nigerian state with the attendant effect of struggle among various ethnic groups for capture of the state power and control of resources. This has led to a deep sense of alienation and politics of ethnic identity. This paper recommends that there should be an overhaul of the political system through constitutional amendment process to expunge provisions that negate federalism and provide for implementation of true federalism. The paper also recommends that there is need to enthrone visionary and transformational leadership that will sincerely tackle and implement true federalism for the good of all.

Health Care Systems' relationships with the public are an essential factor if they are to survive financial pressures on the NHS in England

A redesign across the National Health Service (NHS) in England aims to transform services and make them sustainable, in response to significant financial pressure. We argue that the scale of economies and changes required will inevitably have impacts on patient care and on staff, and that ways of managing these impacts may not be transparent or may involve unwanted consequences. Important ways of mitigating these risks are to involve people and communities, and to adopt a style of leadership that makes openness more possible. We describe frameworks and approaches that can be used for these. They are not simple propositions, in the NHS's context of some continuing centralised command and control, pressure for very rapid change and likely gaps in capability. A review of using other policy levers to improve services suggests that they would not be sufficient on their own to achieve the change sought without priority to both engaging people and communities and developing leadership approaches.

The Role of Governance on the Wellbeing of Individuals or Organisations

Ten of the eleven OECD metrics established for measuring individual wellbeing can be directly affected by how organizations are governed. Two types of governance architecture are considered: (i) simple centralised command and control hierarchies and, (ii) an ecological form universally found in nature and pre-modern societies that Nobel Laureate Elinor Osprom described as possessing “polycentric compound” decision-making centres as also found in human brains. Modern stakeholder controlled organisations that survive over generations typically possess an ecological form of governance. This can be explained by the ability of networks to simplify complex dynamic environments as comprehensively as required to survive from distributed decision-making. While centralised hierarchies simplify complexity incompletely and less immediately by filtering data through different levels that can obscure harms, opportunities and existential threats. The paper concludes that the OECD metrics provide a basis for rating the quality of governance of organisations or democracy with rich opportunities for research.

Governance in English VET: On the functioning of a fractured ‘system’

This article explores the governance structures that cover vocational education and training (VET) in England. The English VET system is highly fragmented, complex and unstable, and has tended to oscillate between centralised command and control, and attempts at marketisation. Its governance arrangements reflect this situation. The various providers of VET are reviewed, and the critical role that national government plays in dictating governance systems in the absence of wider social partnership arrangements or fully functioning employer representation systems is explored. The distinctive form and role of the funding agencies, the national learning inspectorate and the qualifications regulator are noted, and the design principles that underlie systems governance are discussed. Three trends that are disrupting the current settlement are analysed – fiscal retrenchment, moves towards ‘employer ownership’ of provision and the growing drive towards localisation. The article concludes by arguing that the current governance model is liable to come under serious pressure.

Power Electronics at the Grid Edge : The key to unlocking value from the smart grid

Utilities implementing diverse grid modernization initiatives are observing greater volatility at the grid edge that cannot be managed using traditional electromechanically switched centralized command and control solutions. The decentralized, distributed, and dynamic capabilities required can only be achieved with semiconductor-based power electronics solutions that are deployed appropriately along the grid edge. The key control objective is the fast and granular control of volts and vars at hundreds of points along the feeder, a functionality typically associated with static synchronous compensators (STATCOMs) and unified power flow controllers (UPFCs), albeit in a distributed manner and at lower voltage levels. Several companies are now offering grid-edge power-electronics solutions to solve this new set of challenges, with substantial data from the field validating the benefits that such solutions can provide. This article discusses the challenges, solutions, and some of the results that point to the benefits that power electronics at the grid edge can provide for utilities.

Mission Command in the Information Age: A Normal Accidents Perspective on Networked Military Operations

Theory on the use of information technology in military operations assumes that bringing together units in an information network helps units to work together. Decentralized command systems such as mission command have been proposed for these networks, so that units can adapt to changes in their turbulent working environments. Others have proposed centralized command systems that permit higher organizational levels to closely direct military operations. This article uses Perrow’s (1984, 1999) Normal Accidents Theory to propose that increasing interdependencies between units in information networks places incompatible demands on the design of networked military operations. It is concluded that networked military operations require decentralized command approaches, but only under the condition that interdependencies between modules of networked units are weak rather than tight. This precondition is essential for retaining control over networked military operations.

Thailand momentum on policy and practice in local legislation on dengue vector control.

Over a past decade, an administrative decentralization model, adopted for local administration development in Thailand, is replacing the prior centralized (top-down) command system. The change offers challenges to local governmental agencies and other public health agencies at all the ministerial, regional, and provincial levels. A public health regulatory and legislative framework for dengue vector control by local governmental agencies is a national topic of interest because dengue control program has been integrated into healthcare services at the provincial level and also has been given priority in health plans of local governmental agencies. The enabling environments of local administrations are unique, so this critical review focuses on the authority of local governmental agencies responsible for disease prevention and control and on the functioning of local legislation with respect to dengue vector control and practices.

The challenge of design of intergovernmental relations in economies in transition

The governments of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union are at a crucial juncture in their movement from highly centralized command economies to more decentralized market economies. While there is a belief in these countries that decentralization brings greater economic efficiency, the reality is that such a transition is a difficult process. This paper examines what types of administrative reforms are needed for the decentralization process, how far along the countries are with respect to these reforms, and what reforms are missing. As we discuss, many of the necessary administration reforms are missing and we argue that more attention must be paid to these elements for successful decentralization of these governments. This paper examines the recent experience and reform needs of the key administrative aspects of the design of intergovernmental relations in countries in transition in Eastern Europe and in the former Soviet Union. There is a widespread realization in all of these countries that decentralizing government will help increase efficiency in the public sector just as privatization will improve efficiency in their economies. Decentralization of government operations is also attractive as a way to cement a democratic form of government. Despite the appearances of the existence of an already decentralized system, such as in the case of the Soviet Union, this experiment started in practically all cases with a lack of institutions and experience on how decentralized government operations should be organized. As different as these countries are, there are many similarities in the reform process they are following in order to decentralize government structure. While the basic components of a decentralized system of government are emerging in many of these countries the structure of government has not fully evolved in a manner that can support such a decentralized system. Often, governments remain structured along a vertical hierarchy: information, budgetary authority, and revenue pass from the central government down to subnational levels of government while little communication or interaction exists at a horizontal level. In general, the assignment of revenue and expenditure has not been clearly defined among the two or three levels of government, central government transfers continue to occur in a relatively ad hoc manner, and the entire budgeting system still rests in many cases on more or less formal system of negotiations and bargaining among the different levels of government. There has been some change in this structure in certain countries. Over the last three years, both Poland and Hungary have legally increased the automony of subnational governments. In 1994 in Russia a new and more transparent system of intergovernmental grants has been established between the federal government and the regions. In 1994 also, Latvia introduced a more transparent formula-driven, transfer formula for the regional and municipal governments. The focus of this paper is to develop a “blue print” for necessary changes in organization and administration of intergovernmental relations in countries in transition. While many experts have recently been discussing the public finance policy components of this new, evolving relationship among levels of government, less attention has been paid to the structural and administrative challenges and the information design issues that must be met in order to develop and support a system of intergovernmental relations. The paper is organized as follows: First we review the major responsibilities and their allocation among levels of government, the assignment of revenue sources, and the system of transfers. We then turn to a discussion of the current experience of Eastern European and NIS countries in the context of the structural components of an intergovernmental fiscal system. Next, we analyze the organizational reforms that are necessary for the efficient functioning of a decentralized system of government in the economies in transition. Finally we “rate” the transition economies in relation to their current design of the system of intergovernmental relations and support mechanisms.

Financial-Market Reform in the Czech Republic, 1991-1994: The Revival of Repression?

In 1991 the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic embarked on the rapid liberalization of its financial markets under tight monetary policy. This involved the creation of a functioning capital market through a program of mass privatization, along with the establishment of a universal banking system. In these respects, the Czech Republic is considered one of the most successful examples of post-socialist reform. But evidence from the former CSFR and the Czech Republic between 1991 and 1994 also shows that some of the main institutions created to oversee industrial-financial reform have been converted into instruments of indirect, selective credit-allocation, due largely to the leverage of economically non-viable firms and their large-bank creditors, together with the unwillingness of reformers to re-organize fundamentally the economic bureaucracy. How can we explain the formation of these institutions by which reforming governments intervene in financial markets, even in the relatively successful case of the Czech Republic? In a system of financial repression, governmental authorities maintain substantial control over the allocation of credit, which is often granted at below-market interest rates to favored enterprises. This paper suggests that financial repression has political sources. In the economies of the former East Bloc, privatizing firms whose subsidies have been cut off want cheap credit. Old state banks whose portfolios are tied up in bad loans want substantial debt relief. The executive bureaucracies, finally, need to acquire the expertise and information in order to replace centralized command structures with broad financial regulation. So it is in the Czech Republic that reformers, fearing that bankruptcies of the largest firms will send unemployment figures soaring and strengthen the hand of the opposition, are led to design institutional structures which allocate credit to vital industries, which swap bank debt for equity in these firms, and which generally enable some governmental discretion in corporate finance.

Russian grain trading and marketing: Evolution and struggles

The Russian grain marketing system is going through a remarkably traumatic evolutionary change, the dimensions of which are potentially unprecedented in the world grain industry. A highly centralized command system, absent of any concept of a market, has been the mechanism for allocating resources within the grain system. Functions were performed exclusively through state-owned facilities. Product distribution was also on a command basis. Concurrent with many other developments over the past 3 years have been numerous institutional changes in the grain system. Of particular importance is the simultaneous development of „exchanges” and numerous joint stock companies within the grain system. Most notable, however, is that market functions that the Ministry of Procurement traditionally provided were replaced in October 1992 by essentially another monopoly, with powers as extensive as the previous regime. Exchanges flourished in Russia during the early 1990s. Some estimates of the number of exchanges are up to 700. However, far fewer active exchanges are trading grain. The number of exchanges is sizeable, resulting in intense interexchange competition. Trade is primarily in nearby positions of grain. Many other agricultural products and inputs are traded, but futures (as known in the West) are not traded yet. Two agencies of particular importance in the Russian grain system are Roskhleboprodukt and ExportKhleb. The former is a joint stock company responsible for providing grain products to retail outlets. Producers continue to have obligatory deliveries to the Federal (and potentially Regional) Reserves, and prices are controlled at the retail level. Most important is that this firm owned and managed all of the handling system facilities throughout Russia. However, those in other CIS countries are autonomous. Consequently, at least within Russia, a near monopoly in grain handling has replaced findamentally ministerial functions and procurement. ExportKhleb has also been transformed into a joint stock company. Besides being the agent for Roskhleboprodukt on credit imports, ExportKhleb has pursued other trading opportunities, primarily in the former CIS countries, acting fundamentally as a trading company. Despite the rapid changes, numerous obstacles must be overcome as this industry makes the transition toward a market system as known in the West. This article describes changes occurring in the Russian grain market system. Specijic sections describe and analyze: economic conditions confronting the industry; traditional grain marketing organization; the current and evolving marketing system, including detailed discussions of the principal agencies, ExportKhleb, and Roskhleboprodukt; grain exchanges in Russia, their current function, and obstacles inhibiting their evolution; and a discussion of the future of this market and likely progression toward a more competitive system, which would be integrated with the rest of the world. © 1995 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Russian grain trading and marketing: Evolution and struggles

The Russian grain marketing system is going through a remarkably traumatic evolutionary change, the dimensions of which are potentially unprecedented in the world grain industry. A highly centralized command system, absent of any concept of a market, has been the mechanism for allocating resources within the grain system. Functions were performed exclusively through state-owned facilities. Product distribution was also on a command basis. Concurrent with many other developments over the past 3 years have been numerous institutional changes in the grain system. Of particular importance is the simultaneous development of „exchanges” and numerous joint stock companies within the grain system. Most notable, however, is that market functions that the Ministry of Procurement traditionally provided were replaced in October 1992 by essentially another monopoly, with powers as extensive as the previous regime. Exchanges flourished in Russia during the early 1990s. Some estimates of the number of exchanges are up to 700. However, far fewer active exchanges are trading grain. The number of exchanges is sizeable, resulting in intense interexchange competition. Trade is primarily in nearby positions of grain. Many other agricultural products and inputs are traded, but futures (as known in the West) are not traded yet. Two agencies of particular importance in the Russian grain system are Roskhleboprodukt and ExportKhleb. The former is a joint stock company responsible for providing grain products to retail outlets. Producers continue to have obligatory deliveries to the Federal (and potentially Regional) Reserves, and prices are controlled at the retail level. Most important is that this firm owned and managed all of the handling system facilities throughout Russia. However, those in other CIS countries are autonomous. Consequently, at least within Russia, a near monopoly in grain handling has replaced findamentally ministerial functions and procurement. ExportKhleb has also been transformed into a joint stock company. Besides being the agent for Roskhleboprodukt on credit imports, ExportKhleb has pursued other trading opportunities, primarily in the former CIS countries, acting fundamentally as a trading company. Despite the rapid changes, numerous obstacles must be overcome as this industry makes the transition toward a market system as known in the West. This article describes changes occurring in the Russian grain market system. Specijic sections describe and analyze: economic conditions confronting the industry; traditional grain marketing organization; the current and evolving marketing system, including detailed discussions of the principal agencies, ExportKhleb, and Roskhleboprodukt; grain exchanges in Russia, their current function, and obstacles inhibiting their evolution; and a discussion of the future of this market and likely progression toward a more competitive system, which would be integrated with the rest of the world. © 1995 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Before and after 1789: A cantonal markets economy

Richard Cantillon identified in early eighteenth-century Europe two distinct forms of mercantile economy, one that economist Antoin E. Murphy calls ‘a centralized command economy’ and a second that he designates as ‘a competitive market economy’ or ‘decentralized market system’. The first system had a basis, writes Murphy, in a ‘centralized estate’ model, with the landlord determining what was to be produced. Under the second system, the entrepreneur was a risk taker. Buying goods ‘at a known price’, he sold them later at what was at the time of purchase ‘an uncertain price’.’ Murphy’s identification of the ‘centralized command economy’ with the large centralized estate stems from Cantillon’s own depiction of the great landlord or his property ‘comme s’iln’y en avoit aucune autre au monde’.2 The great landlord (an ideal type often comprising several real landlords) did not act in isolation. But while the role of the superlandlord or expanding and increasingly powerful territorial state-in Cantillon’s terminology, the ‘Court’-complicates matters, it does not alter the fundamental analysis. A crucial element that Murphy omits from Cantillon’s paired scheme of the command economy, on the other hand, is the market place or cantonal market. For a necessary complement to the network of landlords in a command economy is the market town, indeed, a polycentric model of semiautonomous markets. Cantillon explains the nature and function of the market town (bourg) or cantonal market:

The Crisis and Upheaval in Eastern Europe

The dramatic upheavals in Eastern Europe, in the face of democratic pressures from below and long overdue reforms and liberalization from above, highlight the general crisis of the state systems ruled by Communist parties. Political and economic reforms have pushed the prolonged low level systemic crisis of the East European state socialist systems into apparently terminal crisis. The East European state systems, their differences notwithstanding, permit us to speculate about a general question: the limits and possibilities of change in the Communist regimes. A number of the proposed Soviet reforms have been experimented with for over two decades on the much smaller scale which individual East European countries afford. Comparisons have to made with caution since the East European Communist regimes have been imposed on these states from the outside and were in any case more recent than the Soviet one. The order of scale itself is also important. However there are sufficient similarities for Eastern Europe to be a cracked mirror of the Soviet Union's possible future, or at least the most probable future. The fate of these societies and political systems has a direct bearing on any prospects of the socialist project since it was in good part the flawed and perverted experiences of the Soviet and East European communist politocrasies that put the very idea of socialism in question everywhere. Whatever democratic socialists and various native intellectual dissidents say about these societies not having been genuinely socialist and therefore not a valid test of the possibility of socialism for the vast majority of the world those experiences do bear on the validity of some major assumptions shared by socialists in general. AL the very least, they cast a very negative light on the performance of highly centralized command economies at other than early industrialization stages of development.' There is also some distorted family resemblance and a partly similar vocabulary. The Prague Spring in 1968 had been greeted with joy and relief by activists in the mass Communist parties of the industrial capitalist democracies since it seemed to show that communism in power could regenerate itself. Two decades later the Gorbachev reforms raise hopes among a far wider political public, although (or perhaps because) they occur under conditions of a visible moral and ideological crisis of both Communist politocratic regimes and the general socialist project. The hope for internal redemption and transformation remains a powerful one that all the sacrifices and brutalities under these regimes will not