Table Of ContentM.A.Persits
Revolutionaries
# o f India
in Soviet Russia
Mainsprings
o f the Communist Movement
in the East
Edited by Professor
R. A. Ulyanovsky
RBI
Progress Publishers
Moscow
Translated from the Russian by Lev Bobrov
Designed by Vladimir Shorts
M. A. IlepcHif
PEBOJTIOUHOHEPbl HHRHH B CTPAHE COBETOB
Ha anemilcKoM nsbttte
© H3AaTejibc.TB0 «HayKa», 1973
) Progress
English translation of the revised Russian text I
Publishers 1983
Printed in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
0504040000-540
014(01)-83
CONTENTS
Page
P r e f a c e ................................. 5
Introduction........................................................................................ 12
C h a p t e r I. The Impact of the Great October Socialist Revo
lution on the Oppressed East and Indian Revolutionary
Emigres in Soviet R ussia ............................................................. 17
Organised Indian Emigres in Soviet Russia . . . . . 37
Unorganised Indian Emigres................................................66
Social and Political Profile of Indian Revolutionary Emigres 81
Ch a p t e r II. The Emergence of the Communist Movement
Among the Working People from Foreign Eastern Nations
in Soviet Russia. The Role of Lenin and the Comintern in
the Marxist Education of Asia’s First Communists . . . 97
Bolsheviks’ Internationalist Work with the Toiling People
of Foreign Eastern N a tio n s................................................98
The Beginning of the Communist Movement Among Citi
zens from Foreign Eastern N a tio n s ................................102
Indian Revolutionaries Adopting Marxism-Leninism . . 108
Indian and Other Early Eastern Communists at the Second
World Congress of the Communist International . . 124
C h a p t e r III. Ideological and Political Battles Among Indian
Revolutionary Emigres in the Soviet Republic. The First In
dian Communist Group Form ed.............................................171
A Provisional Indian Revolutionary Committee Established 173
l»
3
The First Organised Group of Indian Communists . . . 189
The Military School of Indian Revolutionaries. The Mil
itary Factor inE asternR evolutions.................................... 226
The Western Group ofI ndian National Revolutionaries
in Moscow......................... '■ ............................................. 258
In Lieu of Conclusion.......................................................................277
Preface
I
The October Revolution and the East is a subject which,
for all the abundance of studies about it, is still far from
exhausted. With more research findings available and more
evidence discovered, it becomes clear that the impact of
the October Revolution on Asia has been greater and deeper
than it was first believed to have been. This is the conclu
sion one arrives at when reading a book that brings out
some hitherto unknown aspects of the influence the Great
October Socialist Revolution had on the struggle of im
perialist-oppressed peoples.
This book provides an insight into the emigration move
ment of Indian anti-imperialists, fighters for their coun
try ’s freedom and independence, into Soviet Russia. That
movement, full of dramatic revolutionary struggle, good
faith and enthusiasm, could not be stopped by the Hima
layas or by the Hindu Kush, or by the all-seeing and all-
knowing Intelligence Service, or by the ruthless British
colonial administration in India.
Czarist Russia welcomed only merchants and money
lenders from India into her Central Asian provinces. Her
authorities had no sympathy for Indian national revolu
tionaries. After the October Revolution, the Russian Soviet
Socialist Republic became a haven for Indian revolutiona
ries who turned to it for help in fighting for the indepen
dence of their own country.
By telling his story of the Indian revolutionary Emigres
in Russia, and analysing their class background, their
activities and, above all, their views and ideas, the author
of this book opens little-known, and interesting pages from
the history of revolutionary thought in India and the early
stirrings of its Communist movement.
Some of the Indian national revolutionaries who came
to Soviet Russia were politically organised, others not.
The book considers the ideological and tactical views of
revolutionaries from the so-called Provisional Government
of India formed by Mahendra Pratap in Kabul as early
as 1915, and also from a group that had broken away from
that “government” to constitute an Indian section of the
Council for International Propaganda (Sovinterprop) in
Tashkent in April 1920, and also from the Indian Revolu
tionary Association headed by Abdur Rabb Barq and Pra-
tivadi Acharya. Those politically organised groups had ad
vanced rather similar revolutionary-democratic program
mes to achieve India’s full national independence and estab
lish' an Indian Federal Republic. They held primitive
Socialistic views basically rooted in egalitarian and other
mostly pre-Marxian notions of the essence of Socialism.
They had all welcomed the October Revolution as one,
above all, that established the right of nations to self-
determination. This interpretation of the October Revo
lution was perfectly understandable. Indian national revo
lutionaries were not yet prepared to appreciate all the
ideas of the Revolution, least of all, the Socialist gist of
its programme. But it was indicative that they stood pat
on the idea of a close alliance of the Indian national libe
ration movement with Soviet Russia. They saw it as their
main defender and liberator.
It is not surprising that some of the personalities and
groups just mentioned should have combined their un
questionable forward-looking notions with retaining and
even accentuating their regressive views, as the fear of a
massive grass-root revolution, adherence to conspiratorial
tactics and individual terrorism, overemphasising of, and
insistence on the liberation of India by force of arms, up
to and including armed intervention from outside, to end
British colonial rule.
The Indian section of the Tashkent-based Council for
International Propaganda came nearer than other Indian
national revolutionaries to Socialist ideals and to under
standing that India’s freedom and independence could be
won through a massive and active struggle of the Indian
people themselves. This was a major achievement of the
group, especially since the mass movement inside' India
\vas confined to Gandhian nonviolent civil disobedience.
The book'^also portrays politically unorganised Indian
revolutionaries, describes their attitude to the Soviet sys
tem of government, and recalls those of them who, arms
6
in hand, defended the Socialist Revolution against White-
guards and armed basmach bands in Central Asia.
As could be seen from a scrutiny of factual material,
most of the Indians arriving in Soviet Russia turned to the
Soviet Government, above all, for military aid in launching
the liberation struggle in India. They believed that the
only way to end British rule in India was by force of arms,
and that meant arming the masses and getting direct
military aid from the Red Army of Soviet Russia. It was
not easy to teach those national revolutionaries a sense of
reality, so it is not surprising that they should not have
accepted much of the ideology and tactics of Marxism.
But, some of the revolutionary emigres did want to learn
Marxism in Soviet Russia so as to use it to resolve the
political and social problems of their country’s liberation
from British rule. There were more and more of them,
which meant that the Marxist theory of revolution was
gripping the minds of the advanced fighters for Indian
independence. Many of that group of revolutionaries sub
sequently took the lead in starting and organising the na
tional liberation, working-class, peasant and Communist
movement in India.
This book considers some aspects of the origin of the
Indian Communist movement. The immigrant Indian
revolutionary community in Soviet Russia produced the
first Communist group which declared itself to be the
Communist Party of India, though it never became one.
The book provides conclusive evidence to show that the
formation of the Indian Communist Party was a long and
tortuous process. It took place in a country with a semi-
feudal peasantry making up the bulk of the population
, and an insignificant proportion of proletariat whose class
consciousness was at a low level. The bourgeoisie, on the
other hand, had a certain amount of political experience
to go by. The country was bedevilled by caste and religious
traditions, British colonialists maintained a system of ruth
less military and political terror which had to be braved
by a sweeping national liberation movement of almost all
classes of society.
The independent Communist movement in India and sim
ilar countries faced considerable difficulties as it emerged.
It is worth mentioning that Lenin questioned the very
possibility of true proletarian Communist parties* commit
ted to the ideology of Marxism, arising in those countries
7
in the early 1920s. The fact that the first Communist group
was formed of Indian revolutionary Emigres in Soviet Russia
and that the Communist Party took years, subsequently^to
shape up did attest to the difficulties the emergent Commu
nist movement in India had to surmount.
II
Indian revolutionary emigres are not the only characters
of this narration. The book tells the story of revolution
aries and other citizens from China, Turkey, Persia, and
Korea who came to Soviet Russia in 1917 and in the early
1920s. There were at least a million nationals of Asian
countries bordering on Russia in the Soviet Republic at
the time. Those were not only peasants and artisans who
had been ruined and impoverished in their native lands, but
also a certain proportion of workers and a host of disin
herited people, not engaged in production, primarily from
Iran and China. The author has thoroughly analysed the
objective and subjective factors of Soviet influence on that
huge mass of Oriental working people who had congregated
in Soviet Central Asia, the Far East and in Siberia, and
constituted a sizable anti-imperialist force.
Having become the eye-witnesses of the Russian revolu
tionary events and experiencing their liberating effect, the
more politically conscious of those citizens took part in
the Soviet people’s armed struggles against the White-
guards and foreign invaders. They showed they realised
that from November 1917 onwards, the outcome of the na
tional liberation struggles of the oppressed peoples they
formed part of was predicated directly on the consolidation
of Soviet government in Russia.
Besides, under the impact of the October Revolution
and the political work of the Bolsheviks, the revolution
aries and advanced working people of the Orient, who
were in Soviet Russia, launched a Communist movement
by forming Communist groups and cells.
That Was ah event of historic importance as the start
in training the leading core of the national Communist
parties of India, China, Turkey, and Iran. That is to say
that the later-to-be Communist parties of a number of
Asian countries were built not only in their home countries,
but, outside, in Soviet Russia, as well. That was a logical
historical twin process arising from the victory of the Great
October Socialist Revolution, Sq the hook brings out and
i
looks into problems of general importance for a study of
the conditions of the origin of Oriental Communist parties,
those in the countries bordering on Russia in particular.
In examining the ideological and political views of the
early Communists of India and other Oriental countries,
the author shows their similarity, notably, their left-secta
rian and voluntarist positions. In other words, the budding
Communists of the East were particularly afflicted with
the infantile disorder of “leftism”, which essentially im
plied mechanically and undialectically borrowing the Rus
sian experience and, consequently, ignoring the specific
historical situation and national environment of Oriental
peoples. “Leftism” did, of course, hamper the Communists
in their effort to win the masses over.
The author of this book is not the only one to have stu
died and criticised the left-sectarian views of the early
Communists of India and other Oriental countries. Other
students have taken this up more than once as well. The
present author has distinguished himself, first, by having
mustered and set out copious material out of record files
on this subject, and, second, by identifying and analysing
not only individual left-sectarian views, but also a whole
system of views and tactics peculiar to many Communist
groups and parties of Oriental countries in the 1920s. The
reasons behind that objective phenomenon are brought out
in detail and relief to prove the validity of Lenin’s con
clusion that “economic relations which are backward, or
which lag in their development, constantly lead to the
appearance of supporters of the labour movement who as
similate only certain aspects of Marxism, only certain parts
of the new world outlook, or individual slogans and de
mands, being unable to make a determined break with
all the traditions of the bourgeois world outlook in general
and the bourgeois-democratic world outlook in particular”.1
The book cogently proves that it was the adoption of
Socialism as a science to follow by the most consistent and
patriotically-minded revolutionary democrats that was one
of the major historical factors behind the emergence of the
Communist movement in the East. The author writes: “It
was not through a labour movement that Indian national
revolutionaries advanced towards Marxism, as a rule,—
1 V. I. Lenin, “Differences in the European Labour Movement”,
Collected Works, Vol. 16, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1963, p. 348.
9
they were not connected with it at all and, for the most
part, failed to see its significance—but through an anti
imperialist liberation struggle and through their affection
for the Soviet system of State power which had become
the world’s most important anti-colonialist' force and a
real base of support for the liberation movement of the
peoples of the Bast” (see p. 112). “In the Eastern countries,”
he adds elsewhere, “it was principally the national revolutio
nary and revolutionary democratic intellectuals that made
the first Communists and formed the first Communist groups
that gave rise to a Communist movement” (see p. 282).
Of course, with the passage of time, the national revo
lutionaries came nearer to Marxism, increasingly stimulated
by social trends that were gaining ground in the national
liberation movement as the working class started independent
action in major industrial capitalist centres of India.
Indian national revolutionaries turned to the scientific
theory of Socialism and to the evidence of its actual ap
plication by Russian Communists under Lenin’s guidance
to see how they had to go about winning their own national
independence and resolving their urgent social problems.
The essentially petty-bourgeois origin of the early Com
munists of the East accounted for their left-sectarian de
viation from science-based Socialism which they were yet
to achieve. Having studied the outlook of the early Com
munists of the East and the views of national revolu
tionary groups in exile, the author has shown that they all
were in various stages of ideological acceptance of Marxism.
The author’s analysis of the origin of the left-sectarian
concepts of the pioneer Communists of Asia and their crit
icism are of practical as well as scientific value. They
can be helpful to the Communist parties of the once colonial
countries in countering any relapses into leftist philosophy
and action in the present conditions.
The conclusions made in the book are based on a thor
ough investigation of a wealth of historical evidence, main
ly from’ Soviet public records and on Lenin’s works, espe
cially those dealing with ethnic relations and colonialism.
M. A. Persits has succeeded in bringing out. some im
portant aspects of Lenin’s dispute with M. N. Roy, which
has not yet been given an adequate treatment in historical
publications, although, as the author has shown, many bour
geois scholars are extra keen on this particular subject.
He has provided a novel apd convincing characterisation of
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