Ehsan Malik

Ehsan Malik (1939 - 2012) was a Pakistani-Russian socialist activist and intellectual. He was noted for publishing the first criticisms of the Leonid Brezhnev regime during the reign of Mikhail Gorbachev.
Early life
Ehsan Muhammad Malik was born in Ajmer (now in the Indian state of Rajasthan) in 1939 in a Sunni Muslim family. In a 2004 interview, Malik commented that his family was descended from Arabs who settled in Ajmer to study and advance Islam. Malik's parents were activists with the All India Muslim League. After the partition of India in 1947, Malik's family moved to Bombay (now Mumbai) to escape communal violence. Malik briefly attended school in Bombay until his family obtained a visa to emigrate to the state of Pakistan in 1955. Malik enrolled in the University of Karachi in 1957.
Socialist activism
During his time in Bombay, Malik had become active in socialist student organisations and joined the Communist Party of India in 1955. Upon his migration to Pakistan, Malik joined the fledgling Communist Party of Pakistan (CPP). Although the party enjoyed little popular support, Malik's activism and publications on its behalf drew the interest of the embassy of the Soviet Union in Pakistan. In 1961, he was awarded a scholarship to study international politics at the Saint Petersburg State University. Malik earned his degree in 1965, but owing to political hostility to Communists in Pakistan, he did not return and got a teaching job in Saint Petersburg.
In 1968, he married Yulia Yevetyna, a junior official in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union of Belarussian origin. In 1970, Malik began to work for Comintern, and traveled extensively across India, Iraq, Egypt, Afghanistan and Bangladesh. In 1979, he became a professor of South Asian studies at his alma mater in Saint Petersburg. In 1985, he was finally granted Soviet citizenship.
Writings
Malik is notable for his writings in praise of Soviet leaders Alexei Kosygin and Nikita Khruschev, as well as his criticisms of the failures of Communist political parties in Pakistan and Bangladesh. In 1984, he published his magnum opus - a critique of Leon Trotsky, which was revolutionary considering the repression of Trotskyism in the USSR. The work was praiseful of Trotsky's contributions to international socialism. Malik's writings were supported by the Glasnost regime of Mikhail Gorbachev.
Later life and death
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Malik moved his family to Moscow and stayed there until his death in 2012 from heart failure. He is survived by his widow and their four children.

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