Just as the world was witnessing one of the ‘greatest political and social experiments of the twentieth century ‘ led by the Bolsheviks in the Soviet Union, Indian revolutionaries were also looking up to Moscow for guidance and support in a bid to free the Indian subcontinent from Imperial rule. This excerpt from Ali Raza’s scholarly work on the history of Left in South Asia, ‘Revolutionary Pasts; Communist Internationalism in Colonial India’ posits the centrality of anti-imperial narrative in the agenda of the Third International (Communist International) under Lenin, and how it drew and inspired revolutionaries from colonial India, who flocked to Moscow for training and support.
In bearing witness to a transforming and transformative world, these revolutionaries also bore witness to a rapidly transforming self. As intriguing as the narrations of their time in the Soviet Union are, their accounts are equally telling of what they reveal about the utopianism of their times. Each memoir or testimony, whether recorded directly or indirectly through the good offices of intelligence and policing services, spoke of an affective relationship with Time and History itself. These revolutionaries imagined themselves living in an age of possibilities, an age of transformations, an age of rebirth.
Their narratives speak of one transformative encounter after another, in an endless and inexorable personal journey of overcoming towards political consciousness, enlightenment and a coming of age. There was, in other words, no politics of utopia without a concomitant transforming self. Thus, their accounts frequently speak of ‘conversions’ to communism in ways that echo the devotion of reborn, fervent believers. In that sense, their testimonies are remarkably self-reflexive.
All marvelled at how far they had come in political and intellectual terms. Even more striking is how these individuals imagined themselves as willing, fully conscious agents of History. And yet, they also felt burdened by History and the role it had decreed for them. Far from being unusual, this was characteristic of the revolutionary times these individuals inhabited. And there was no better embodiment of that than the people, institutions and ideas they encountered in Moscow.
Their patron in Moscow was the Communist International, also known as the Comintern or the Third International. Founded in Moscow in 1919 as the successor to the Second and First Internationals, the Comintern was intended as a party for communist parties around the world. The template had already been set by Lenin in 1917 when he declared that the Bolsheviks would take the initiative in creating a Third International.
By the end of the First World War it had become clear to the Bolsheviks and allied parties that the old socialist and social-democratic camps under the Second International ‘had become completely bankrupt’ and were incapable of revolutionary action. Amongst other things, the Socialist International failed to oppose the War, an act that was viewed by Lenin and others as an egregious betrayal of the working classes of Europe. The Communist International, then, was intended as a truly revolutionary body that would lead the workers of the world in a global revolutionary upheaval towards socialism. Its First Congress, hastily and comically, organised in Moscow in March 1919 with only a few dozen delegates, made little secret of its ambitions for World Revolution. To that end, it was open to communist parties around the world. Communist parties of other countries were viewed as national sections of this one centrally organised body. Its dominance by Bolsheviks and the ensuing shifts in its policy aside, the ethos of the Comintern’s internationalism was reflected in its very make-up and in the concerns with which it preoccupied itself until its dissolution in 1943.
Lenin had argued, proletarian internationalism would remain a ‘meaningless phrase’ until the proletariat demanded ‘the right of political secession for the colonies and for the nations that “its own’ nation oppresses”’
Allied to this commitment was a very real sense of inaugurating a new age and a new world. In the Comintern’s documents, it is difficult to understate the significance of this imagined new epoch. It is difficult for a reader otherwise used to plodding through dense and mind-numbing analyses on modes of production, material conditions, capitalism, imperialism and so on, not to be struck by the tenor and imagery of Comintern pronouncements. The language is apocalyptic, the narrative marked by convulsions, the vision millenarian, the tone fierce, angry, unforgiving, breathless, urgent. Text after text unabashedly and pompously predicts the birth pangs of a new, utopian world amid the disease, crisis, devastation, exhaustion, decay, collapse and moral and material disintegration of the old. These, it should be said, were only a few among many such terms used to describe the ongoing crisis and opportunity, of a post-war world. Foremost among these opportunities was the promise of an imminent Revolution, a revolution that would do away with the old, the stultified, the decayed and the diseased. Indeed, nowhere is this better depicted than in the iconic poster of Lenin sweeping the world of ‘filth’ by the famed poster artist, Viktor Deni.
It is difficult to fault the Bolsheviks and their allies for reaching this conclusion. The First World War, characterised as a war between rival imperialisms, had brought unprecedented devastation and ruin to Europe. The unimaginable horror and loss of life, coupled with severe political and economic instability, seemingly spelt the death of the old world. Meanwhile, Europe and Germany in particular, was suffering from civil unrest and political upheavals. It only seemed a matter of time before revolutionary tides swept Europe. ‘Humanity’, as Eric Hobsbawm pithily put it, ‘was waiting for an alternative.’ Adding to the fervour and urgency of the moment was a visceral fear of ‘new crises, new wars’ and the consequent ‘impoverishment of whole countries and the death of millions of workers’.If anything, the anticipated war would be vastly more ‘destructive, inhuman and horrible than its predecessor’.
We are bound to you by a common destiny,’ Karl Radek had promised delegates in a fiery speech at the famous Congress of the Peoples of the East held in Baku in September 1920.
For many, the only thing that could possibly redeem humanity was a global revolutionary upheaval. This was partly why the question of imperialism was central to the Comintern’s concerns. The Comintern’s position on the colonial question echoed Lenin’s firm support for national liberation struggles around the globe, not least because the colonial question was inseparably linked to revolution in Europe. Lenin, along with other major thinkers like John Hobson and Karl Kautsky, had long considered imperialism to be ineluctably linked to capitalism; with his pamphlet ‘Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism’ being the most prominent explication of his argument. To overthrow capitalism in the West, it was essential to overthrow imperialism in the colonies. Put differently, the revolution in the West would come via the East. ‘We are bound to you by a common destiny,’ Karl Radek had promised delegates in a fiery speech at the famous Congress of the Peoples of the East held in Baku in September 1920.
As secretary of the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI), he made it clear that the question of internationalist solidarity and unity was a matter of survival for both East and West. For that reason, the proletariat in Western Europe could not afford to neglect the colonial question. After all, as Lenin had argued, proletarian internationalism would remain a ‘meaningless phrase’ until the proletariat demanded ‘the right of political secession for the colonies and for the nations that “its own’ nation oppresses”’. From its very inception then, the Comintern was occupied with internationalising the revolution and this was a commitment that survived, however tenuously, Joseph Stalin’s declaration of ‘Socialism in One Country’ and apparent abandonment of the idea of world revolution.
Also present at the Baku Congress, along with 1891 delegates – 44 of them women – from 32 nationalities, were delegates from India. A few among them were muhajirin. Far from being the first to do so, they were part a rapidly growing number of Indians who were gravitating towards Moscow.
Also present at the Baku Congress, along with 1891 delegates – 44 of them women – from 32 nationalities, were delegates from India.
This seemingly ironclad commitment was predictably attractive to revolutionaries across the colonised world, particularly those from the British Empire, the primary target of Comintern schemes. As Grigory Zinoviev, President of the ECCI, thundered at the Baku Congress, the Comintern was ready to ‘help the East to liberate itself from English Imperialism’ in a near cosmic struggle that was likened to a ‘real holy war’. The Manifesto of the Congress repeatedly cried out to the ‘Peoples of the East’ – an overly generous category including Indians, Turks, Afghans, Persians, Arabs, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Armenians, Georgians, Tartars and many others besides – to save themselves, and the rest of the world, from capitalism and British imperialism. Meanwhile, the message for British comrades was equally clear. The Second Congress of the Comintern had already declared that any British socialist who failed to ‘support by all possible means the uprisings in Ireland, Egypt and India’ deserved to be ‘branded with infamy, if not with a bullet’. Indeed, it was only through internationalising the revolution that British comrades could hope to bring about a revolution in Britain itself.
Also present at the Baku Congress, along with 1891 delegates – 44 of them women – from 32 nationalities, were delegates from India. A few among them were muhajirin. Far from being the first to do so, they were part a rapidly growing number of Indians who were gravitating towards Moscow.
First in the field were two remarkable characters from Delhi, the brothers Sattar Khairi and Jabbar Khairi, who reportedly interviewed Lenin as early as November 1918. They also addressed in Urdu a meeting of the ‘Executive Committee of the Soviet’, in which they congratulated the leaders of the Russian Revolution on behalf of ‘70 million Indian Mussalmans’ and asked for their assistance in freeing Indians from the ‘high-handed oppression of the English’. They were the first of many deputations of Indians who would approach Moscow for consultation, training, support and sustenance over the following years. These included the who’s who of Indian revolutionaries of this period: Rattan Singh and Santokh Singh from the Ghadar Party, Virendranath Chattopadhyaya of the Berlin India Committee, Maulvi Barkatullah and Ubaidullah Sindhi of the former ‘Provisional Government of India’ in Kabul and, last but not least, M.N. Roy. To this list one can add other prominent Indian revolutionaries, all of whom initially viewed the Bolshevik Revolution as a lodestone that could pave the way for a revolutionary upheaval of global proportions and help free India from imperial rule.
It was easy to be drawn to the Soviet Union. From Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky to Grigory Zinoviev and Karl Radek, the leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution had all pointed to India as one the sites to which the revolution had to be exported. The importance of India to World Revolution was emphasised time and again in the thunderous pronouncements of the Baku Congress. Britain, as the Congress’s Manifesto pointed out, had pillaged India and turned its peasants and workers into ‘dumb beasts of burden without any rights’. To add to that, millions had died of hunger year upon year. Meanwhile, Indians had fought for the Empire in all corners of the world. And yet, to add insult to injury, Indians had been treated as pariahs in their own nation, in which every demand for rights, for autonomy, for parity, was met by ‘ruthless mass shootings’. There was little option, then, but for a revolutionary upheaval that would overthrow the British Empire. To that end, the Comintern emphatically supported the revolutionary struggle in India. One of the most visible manifestations of that commitment was the founding of a political and military training school for Indian revolutionaries in Tashkent in 1920. Run under the auspices of M.N. Roy, the ‘Tashkent school’ catered to muhajirin who had pledged their loyalty to the Soviet Union and the Bolshevik Revolution. While the school itself was short-lived, the Soviet Union’s active support for Indian revolutionaries continued long into the 1940s. There was no better evidence of that than in the unceasing stream of Indian revolutionaries that continued to flock to Moscow in search of a new world.
The text has been reproduced with permission from the author as well as the publishing house.
