The Russian Revolution and the Freedom Struggle in India: Rabindranath Tagore’s Letters from Russia

Abstract

The Russian Revolution and its experiments with socialism impacted the Indian Freedom Struggle in many different ways. Not only did it play a catalytic role in the formation of the Indian Communist Party and eventually helped the transformation of a good number of freedom fighters into communists, but it also initiated debates and discussions within the public domain regarding the relevance of this great political upheaval to the Indian situation even among thinkers and intellectuals who had not been converted to socialist thinking. This essay documents the impact of the Russian revolution on the Bengali intelligentsia who were involved in the freedom struggle. In particular, it chooses one episode, in this complex intellectual history which evolved in many different ways in different parts of India, that is, Rabindranath Tagore’s visit to Soviet Russia in 1930 and assesses the impact of the ideas unleashed by the revolution on the intellectuals in Bengal.