Thanks to the impasse between Russia and the IIHF over agreement on an NHL player-transfer agreement, projected superstar forward and Pittsburgh Penguins first-rounder Evgeni Malkin is apparently taking the undercover route to play hockey in North America this season.

“The players, coaching staff are very upset because for four days Malkin was training with the team and suddenly he is gone without saying a word to anyone,” club head Gennady Velichkin told Reuters on Sunday.

Malkin, who was drafted second overall by the Pittsburgh Penguins in 2004, was with the team in Finland for training camp when he disappeared with his belongings and passport on Saturday.

This is hauntingly reminiscent of the Cold War SOP of smuggling Soviet draft picks from behind the Iron Curtain. Is this how it’s going to be — effectively forcing young Russian players to “defect” in order to join their National Hockey League clubs?

Next thing you know, even the most highly-touted talents in Russia will be passed over until the later rounds of the Entry Draft, simply because the chances of getting them to North America will be so iffy. That was the case in the ’80s, when the likes of Slava Fetisov and Alexander Mogliny weren’t picked until the late, despite their high ratings. Another Cold War, indeed.

Francis Fukuyama is hardly the first author to have his concepts co-opted by unexpected circles. Still, despite his earlier disassociation with the neocons, I have to believe that his latest repudiation of the movement is as harsh as he can make it:

“The End of History,” in other words, presented a kind of Marxist argument for the existence of a long-term process of social evolution, but one that terminates in liberal democracy rather than communism. In the formulation of the scholar Ken Jowitt, the neoconservative position articulated by people like [William] Kristol and [Robert] Kagan was, by contrast, Leninist; they believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will. Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States. Neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support.

Regardless of the relative ideological neutrality of Leninism (its methods can be applied independently of economic system, as the Nazis and scores of other far-right regimes demonstrated), presenting a comparison with communism is enough to make the likes of Kristol and Kagan see, er, red. Even couched in Fukuyama’s clinic analysis, I’d say the gloves are fully off.

Marxism points to the theory of alienation as a damaging condition of living as a worker in a capitalist society.

Silly leftists! I guess their historical dialectic didn’t foresee that industrial-themed musical productions are the perfect corporate tonic for any feelings of extreme separation from the products of one’s own labor. Spending ten hours in a canning factory is a breeze as long as you have a toe-tapping revue to look forward to at the next company meeting!

Not to get too carried away with the sociological significance of these audio artifacts, but [industrial musical collector Steve] Young believes that the recording of industrial musicals helps shed some light on the inner workings of modern-day corporations.

“They say things at these shows that they don’t say in public,” Young said.

Among the “sinister corporate chatter” Young has detected is a lyric in a 1979 Coca-Cola bottlers show that talks about sending “the OSHA guys straight to hell.” And a 1957 Ford show predicted that, in the sales realm at least, “we’ll beat the hell out of Chevy!”

Bygone corporate culture to a three-quarters beat. I love it! In fact, I think it would behoove today’s corporations to adopt this all-singin’ all-dancin’ human-resource approach. Here are some motivational song proposals, appropriate to each company:

Microsoft: “Fire That Fox“, “Pluck That Penguin“.

Halliburton: “We Know Dick“, “That Petrol Emotion”.

Wal-Mart: “Big-Box Stores, Big-Box Hearts”, “Zoning-Board Blues”.