FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE
The 1917 Russian revolution founded the world’s first communist government. Its electrifying pledge on November 20 that year to provide support to anticolonial struggles was a big boost to India’s independence movement and its leaders
In a room on the second floor of the College Street Coffee House, the stillsturdy Kolkata institution, the evening light rests on a row of books that line a shelf facing a window. These are by MN Roy, the Indian revolutionary extremist who turned communist in America, and who, on Lenin’s invitation, presented his colonial thesis at the Second Congress of the Comintern (Communist International) in Moscow, 1920. But Roy differed with the great Soviet leader – Lenin believed that Indian communists must work with nationalists, even if the latter were “bourgeois”, so as to strengthen the liberation movement as communists in India then were few in number. Roy felt the main task was to build peasant-andworker parties and organise a ‘revolution from below’.
What decisively links the history of the Russian revolution of 1917 to the Indian subcontinent, is what took place nearly two weeks after the revolution. On November 20, 1917, the Council of People’s Commissars in Russia appealed to working classes among the Muslims of the East to rally to Bolshevism to help all oppressed people and secure freedom. This laid the ground for what was eventually to become the crucial Colonial Question that amounted to the Soviet regime unambiguously standing with the peoples of the colonies and giving them material and moral support for their struggles for national independence.
“It had an electrifying effect around the world. And certainly in India,” says political scientist Sobhanlal Datta Gupta. Along with historian Hari Vasudevan, Datta Gupta is among the few Indian experts on the Russian revolution to have accessed the Comintern archives in the 1990s. Datta Gupta in his book, Comintern and the Destiny of Communism in India: 1919-1943, has laid bare the relationship between Soviet Russia and all shades of India’s revolutionaries and the shifting lines in that relationship. Roy may have been one of the first Indian revolutionaries in whom a post-revolutionary Russia took keen interest. But he was not the only one, or the last.
In his memoirs, Roy recalls Lenin overriding his objection to the passivity of Gandhi’s non-violent tactics and his social conservatism with this one question: “Is Gandhi opposing British imperialism or not? If the answer is ‘yes’, you have to work with him.” Popular-Front politics, in which differences and conflicts among various social classes are overlooked in favour of joining ranks against a common foe, is a Leninist idea that Stalin built on during World War II while forging an alliance against the Nazis and Fascism. India’s political leaders have adopted it at various times to build a common platform, says Datta Gupta.
Vijay Prasad, editor, Leftword, and a CPI(M) member, agrees that many political currents of the country join hands with the communist parties of India at various fora. “We are a large tent movement, not only with many left parties trying to act in unity, but with others outside our movement with whom we have close ties and with whom we are often on the streets. I believe that Ambedkar, Periyar and Nehru, the gamut of socialists and liberals in the Indian national movement, took inspiration from the fact that the October Revolution took place in a peasant society that was like India.”
Broadly three kinds of Indian revolutionaries were motoring down the road to Moscow via Central Asia, between the ’20s and the ’40s; or arriving in the capitals of Europe with Moscow as the final destina- MN Roy, (born Narendra Nath Bhattacharya), a Bengali armed revolutionary, reached Russia soon after the Russian revolution. Lenin considered Roy to be an authority on India’s colonial question.
Roy later became a Radical Humanist (RH). The RH office in Kolkata (above). tion. Some of them were the Khilafists who were heading towards Turkey to shore up the Caliphate but ended up being recruited by the Soviets in Afghan territory where the latter were active; some were revolution junkies who wanted to ‘see Lenin’ and thought he was going to be a Russian Garibaldi; some were going to join The Communist University of the Toilers of the East, a training college for cadres from the colonies, or simply to offer themselves as recruits to a revolutionary state in order to bring back ideas to implement at home.
Jawaharlal Nehru, the rising star of the Congress, visited the Soviet Union in 1927 on the 10th anniversary of the revolution. Nehru was also a member of the League Against Imperialism, whose roots lay in the Second Congress of the Comintern. In the backdrop of the Great Depression (1929-39) that had the US on its knees, he was impressed with the Soviet Union’s ‘growth phenomenon’; as was Dravidian leader EVR Periyar, who visited the USSR in the ’30s.
“If you want to know the impact of the Russian revolution on Periyar, the proof of abstract designs were much admired by the painter Marc Chagall.
Malevich sought an aesthetic where form rather than representation was supreme, (this was dubbed Suprematism). Chagall himself had been offered the prestigious post of Commissar for the Arts under the new regime, but he preferred to Subhas Chandra Bose knocked at the doors of the Soviet embassy in Kabul where he had escaped from Calcutta in 1941. When he went to Berlin, he told the Nazis that his Indian Legion would not join their fight against the Soviets.
Political scientist Sobhanlal Datta Gupta is among the few Indian experts on the Russian revolution to have accessed the Comintern archives in the 1990s. Jawaharlal Nehru had visited Moscow on the 10th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1927. The Nehru-Stalin relationship was a cold one. But the 1961 visit at the invitation of the Russian premier Nikita Krushchev (third from left) cemented Indo-Russian ties. that is what Karunanidhi (Karunanidhi draws from the Periyarist political heritage) named his son – Stalin,” says veteran Congressman Mani Shankar Aiyar with a smile. Aiyar says Nehru returning to India brought the message of the Soviet Union but not its example. (Soviet watchers also point out that after Tagore’s visit to the USSR, two years after Nehru’s, he commended it for its strides in industry and education but issued a word of caution for its lack of “personal freedom”. Tagore’s nephew, Saumyendranath, a communist, had facilitated the visit.).
Subhash Chandra Bose, too, adds Datta Gupta, was not opposed to Soviet Russia even though much has been made of his “alliance with fascists. We all know he landed in Germany but few know that his real destination was the Soviet Union. The first embassy he knocked in Kabul where he had escaped from Calcutta (before he landed in Berlin) was the Soviet embassy. Even after the Battle of Kohima when Bose tried to enter India with Japanese help, he had plans to make a second attempt to go to Moscow to seek Soviet help. In Berlin he had even told the Nazis that the Indian Legion he commanded would not join the Nazis in their fight against the Soviets”.
The promise of a socialist revolution also influenced the Congress back home. A Congress Socialist ginger group was formed in 1930. Jayaprakash Narayan, an important member of this group, “was drawn equally to Gandhi and Marx and that led to his confusions”, says Aiyar. “Nehru did not make communism and socialism synonymous. In the Nehruvian economic model there would be a role for the state in promoting heavy industries and infrastructure but industrialists were always going to have a big role,” he adds.
In line with the Comintern’s policy to spread communism all across the world by breaking down the imperialist system everywhere, Roy set up the first Communist Party of India in Tashkent in 1921; on Indian soil, it was set up in Kanpur in 1925. In 1923, a Madras communist journalist, Singaravelu Chettiar, organised the first May Day celebration in India. “This was likely the first deliberative use of the red flag,” says Vijay Prasad. Communist literature from the Soviet Union continued to enter India through underground channels. Roy returned to India in the ’30s, after having fallen out with Stalin. In Moscow, he had worked with the Russian foreign office. In India, he was arrested.
After jail, the arch internationalist work in Vitebsk, Belarus, where his influence on the modernist art movement was immense. These artists saw themselves as champions of the New Art which was integral to a New Society. There were prominent women in these circles as well, including Maria Lebedeva, whose designs incorporated “progressive” images, such as the red star, smoking factory chimneys and telegraph wires.
Posters remained an important vehicle of artistic communication. Porcelain, much of it produced for export, became another. In 1922, Malevich was among those artists who worked for the State Porcelain Factory in Leningrad. Completely unique and contemporary designs were produced at this factory, which flew in the face of industrial mass production. And that was to become a problem…
Some of the artists felt stifled by the growing pressure to conform to official diktats. Malevich, who was in Berlin in 1927, was ordered home and arrested. (For- turned nationalist, and then in another U-turn, Radical Humanist. “This was not a going against Marx but a move towards a new interpretation of him,” says Abdus Samad Gayen, who teaches political science at Presidency University, Kolkata.
Roy’s case typifies the Indian communists’ dilemma since their brush with Soviet communism, of trying to be consistent on both points – being a ‘good nationalist’ and a ‘good internationalist’ all at once. “The assertion of internationalism by the undivided CPI in 1942 through its opposition to Gandhi’s call for Quit India may have sullied the Indian communists’ public image and given a handle to the Right,” says Hari Vasudevan, “but they felt that the need of the hour was that Britain be joined in the fight against fascism…as by the ’40s, the communists had no clear idea what shape an independent Indian nationstate would take. It was better, in such a scenario, to join the war on the side of the USSR. Right through the ’40s, the communists were putting pressure on the nationalists to move India towards a socialist state.” Communist leader PC Joshi was for a moderate transformation; BT Ranadive pushed a more radical line.
“The bourgeois national democrats strive for the establishment of a free national state,” Roy had said, “whereas the masses of workers and poor are revolting.” Roy’s thesis that Indian society had “two contradictory forces” and both could not develop together, was borne out in the run-up to India’s independence. Says Vasudevan: “In 1948, both the communistled people’s movement of Telangana, and the government of independent India wanted the Nizam out but not for the same reason. The communists wanted land re-distribution, end of forced labour, and a re-arranging of the socio-economic order. The Indian army sent to get the Nizam to sign the accession letter, was also used to crush the communist movement.”
The Soviet example continued to influence India’s communist governments in West Bengal and Kerala. “Not just land reforms, what Kerala did was weaken the police apparatus and have local bodies influence the executive apparatus,” adds Vasudevan. “The Bengal communists also brought in land reforms but have been more anxious about whether they are following the early [Soviet] doctrine, with the result that not much headway was made in creating an Indian doctrine.” How much of the colour red has faded in this part of the world? That may be just the question to ask in this month of the 100th anniversary of the Russian revolution.
AVANTGARDE ARTISTS WERE PART OF RUSSIA’S PROPAGANDA WING
tunately, he left much of his art behind.) His influence on the German Bauhaus and the Dutch De Stijl, and on 20th century graphic design in general, was seminal. Kandinsky had played an important role in the cultural life of the fledgling Soviet state and in the organisation of museums. Like Malevich, he was soon condemned for being “bourgeois”. He moved, first to Weimar Germany and later, having been condemned by the Nazis for the producing “degenerate art”, to Paris.
Hitler and Stalin had fairly similar views on art. Stalin’s taste ran to sentimentalized portraits of rosy-cheeked peasants. In 1932, he closed down all independent artists’ unions. Former Agitprop artists had to adapt to the new climate or risk being blacklisted. Some ended their days in labour camp, but most reconciled themselves to being cogs in the wheel of mass production in government factories, churning out disingenuous examples of socialist realism.