Stalin146;s Indian victims

For a number of Indians, including those born in Bangladesh and Pakistan, the lure of Russia proved fatal. They were drawn to Bolshevism by ...

For a number of Indians, including those born in Bangladesh and Pakistan, the lure of Russia proved fatal. They were drawn to Bolshevism by Lenin and his famous thesis on the National and Colonial Question at the Second Congress of the Comintern 1920. They met their end at the hands of Jossef Stalin.

KGB archival records show that as many as 8216;45 Indian revolutionaries were sent to firing squads on trumped-up charges of espionage and conspiracies8217;.

The purge, which began in the late 1930s, labelled these men 8216;British spies8217;. However, the documents do not elaborate on the charges.

Records collected in the Memorial, an institute run by Russian Indologist Yan Rachinskii in Moscow, show that 12 of the 45 Indians have been identified. They all lived in Moscow.

The Indian Communists in Russia, who held a special relation with several Indian revolutionaries including Savarkar and also the Communist Party of Great Britain, were sent to firing squads just before Stalin signed the Treaty of Non-Aggression with Germany in 1939.

One of them was Birendra Nath Chatterjee, brother of Sarojini Naidu. Chatterjee joined hands with Savarkar to launch a nation-wide movement against the British Government. After travelling in Europe he went to the Soviet Union in 1918 and joined the Comintern. He survived the war of succession following Lenin8217;s death but was arrested in 1937 and put before the firing squad.

Another was Abani Mukherjee whose Russian name was Mukherjee Trilokovich. A professor of history at the Moscow State University, he was arrested and shot the same year as Chatterjee.

Purobi Roy, who holds a chair in St Petersburg University, says that while Russia is trying to find out what happened to the 8216;lost revolutionaries who began vanishing from the late 8217;30s to early 8217;40, there8217;s hardly any interest in India to trace their men. 8216;8216;I think neither the Congress nor the Indian Communists wanted to disturb the Indo-Russian friendship,8217;8217; says Roy.

Roy who visited Russia way back in 1995 with the Asiatic Society team had also come across evidence on Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose8217;s reported presence in Russia after the air crash in Taiwan in 1945.

Concerning the fallouts of the revelations of the Indian killings, Roy is not quite clear. 8216;8216;There isn8217;t any elaboration on the charges barring that they were accused of being British spies and were killed. but I would try to link an interesting letter and 8-page missing report which Ben Bradley, leader of the Communist Party of Great Britain, wrote to Abani Mukherjee saying 8216;Don8217;t allow Subhas Chandra Bose to re-enter India8217;.8217;8217; The letter was written in 1936. At that time Bose was on last leg of his exile in Europe and trying to come back to India with the British Government8217;s permission.

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8216;8216;We8217;ve already mentioned the letter in our book Indo-Russia Relation from 1929 to 1947, Vol 2. Only then we didn8217;t know that these Indian members of Comintern were killed on charges of espionage. Now we could understand at least that Bradley wanted to elicit Comintern8217;s support to put a check on Bose8217;s return from exile. We need more research to know exactly what happened.8217;8217;

But the Indian Government doesn8217;t appear too keen to know what happened.