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The Stalinist Prehistory of the Sino-Russo-Indian Triangle

(David Wolff, Slavic Research Center, Hokkaido University)

In 1955, Nikita Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin visited India and were met everywhere by cheering crowds, chanting the mantra “Indi, rusi, bhai, bhai,” “Indians and Russians are brothers!” Jawaharlal Nehru, the Indian Prime Minister, himself seemed a little taken aback at the scale and sudden spontaneity of the welcome, he had himself organized. He wrote to his sister

Vijayalakshmi Pandit, then serving as High Commissioner of India to the United Kingdom that 1 Yesterday I returned from Calcutta, where I saw a meeting which I think was the biggest of its kind at any time anywhere. The whole of the Calcutta Maidan was filled and it is not an exaggerated estimate to say that there were two million people present. Some people even say three million, but that, I think, is an exaggeration…Here we had a disciplined mass of humanity sitting down quietly and trying to follow the speeches. The effect of this crowd was overwhelming… I think also there is a basic feeling of sympathy for the Soviet Union among many of our poorer classes. This is not a sympathy with their policy but it indicates a feeling that the underdog is treated well there. When Bulganin and Khrushchev came to my house on the first occasion, I was a little surprised to find our gardeners coming with garlands for them. This was entirely spontaneous on their part… This, in effect, was the beginning of a highly public romance between the Soviet Union and India that would escalate over time into a military pact and a friendship treaty. Good feeling and substantive aid would not only continue throughout the Cold War and beyond, with the friendship treaty initiated by the Politburo tandem Kosygin-Brezhnev in 1971 eventually renewed by President

Boris Yeltsin. Gorbachev and Rajiv Gandhi also enjoyed close personal relations and an extensive exchange of views on international relations. Throughout this long continuity Indian foreign policy was dominated by the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, i.e., Jawaharlal, Indira and Rajiv. The dominant principle was a belief that realpolitik could work together with the non-violent, non-aligned

1 Nehru to Pandit, 2 December 1955, published in Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru 2nd Series, Volume 31 (1955-1956), 325. principles of Mahatma Gandhi to construct a world in line with Indian values and increasing Indian influence.

Strikingly, although there were never any cooperative military measures undertaken by the two allies, India became a quintessential balancer in the regional and great power equations of Cold

War realpolitik. Khrushchev’s commitment to an Indian element in his foreign policy soon became a factor in the disintegrating Sino-Soviet alliance. Kissinger’s trip to China via Pakistan in 1971 inexorably led to the signing of the Soviet-Indian Friendship Treaty in that same year. When the

USSR invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the US and China made common cause against “Soviet hegemony,” but Indira Gandhi was more understanding of the Soviet view of the regional calculus.

She was soon rewarded with a huge credit for military purchases of Soviet arms. The MIG became the backbone of the Indian Air Force.

Of course, India, the Soviet Union and China perceived these steps in the lights of their own national interests. What for India might be “balancing China” could well be seen in Moscow as a challenge to the Americans. A full examination of these complex relations and the mutual perceptions that both underlay and derived from them is a task far beyond the scope of this paper.

Instead, my goal below is to examine the prerequisites to this long Cold War and post-Cold War friendship, as they evolved in the period between Indian independence in 1947 and Stalin’s death in

1953.

In a seminal article, Vojtech Mastny has written that 2

As long as Iosif Stalin ruled in Moscow, Soviet relations with India were limited by his view of post-colonial governments as tools of Western imperialism. Stalin saw little benefit to be gained from the fractious Indian Communist Party, which was prone to both leftist and rightist deviations. His strategic ally in Asia was the People’s Republic of China (PRC), which India likewise initially found a more congenial partner because of their common resentment of Western imperialism. During the Korean War, India used its Beijing connection to try to

2 Vojtech Mastny, “The Soviet Union’s Partnership with India” Journal of Cold War Studies 12, 3 (Summer 2010), 51. This is an excellent article, one of the first to make extensive use of Indian sources from the Nehru Museum and Memorial Library, but clearly I do not agree with the brief treatment of the Stalin era. mediate an armistice, which was obstructed by Stalin. Before the Soviet Union and India could get closer, the Soviet despot had to die. Although this is dramatic, it is not true. A careful examination of the available Soviet, Chinese and Indian documentation reveals that from 1949, Stalin was already wary of his “strategic ally,” the

PRC and its leader Mao Zedong. In line with this, he began to re-evaluate the role of India through a series of meetings with both the Indian ambassadors and party secretaries. His office door was more open to India than to any other country outside the Communist bloc. Although Khrushchev was not one to credit Stalin for anything, his India policy was a direct beneficiary of Stalin’s initiatives and, of course, the desire of nascent India and its leaders to make themselves an important place as an independent regional power.

Below I will examine the pre-1953 record of Stalin’s personal involvement with Indian issues to make clear his shift to activate ties and influence after January 1950, the same month in which

Mao visited in Moscow. Aside from the records of three Indian ambassadorial meetings with Stalin, the most of any non-Communist country for these years, 1950-53, Stalin also had a long meeting with Indian Communists in February 1951 that confirmed this direction, calling for united front with the national bourgeoisie. In the presentation below, the Soviet documents are supplemented by

Indian materials from the Nehru and Vijayalakshmi Pandit (Nehru’s sister) files held at the Nehru

Memorial Museum and Library.