Opening a Window

Onto the Third World

india

What did we know about India? I’m talking here about Bulganin and myself. Very little. We followed what Nehru was doing by reading the papers. During Stalin’s time we regarded the policies Nehru was pursuing as something close to pacifism. The teachings of Gandhi about nonresistance to evil and his other statements along the same lines, in the spirit of Tolstoy, were not attractive to us.1 We valued Gandhi’s nobility of spirit, but we didn’t understand him. In today’s world, we felt, it was impossible to win freedom by such methods. Nehru had been Gandhi’s closest friend, and we made no distinction on the personal level between Nehru and Gandhi. The political goals that Gandhi had set for himself were pursued further by Nehru, but when they achieved British withdrawal from India, that gave a different resonance to their policies. At that point, whether we wanted to or not, we had to listen

more closely to what the leaders of the Indian people were saying.

Our knowledge of India, to tell the truth, was not only superficial but downright primitive. Don’t laugh, but I personally drew some of my knowledge of India from an aria sung by an Indian merchant in the opera by RimskyKorsakov entitled Sadko.2

He sang: “Countless the diamonds deep in our caverns of stone.” I knew that the weather there was warm, that the sea did not freeze, that the country possessed countless riches, and that the animal world there was something fantastic. There were jungles. The very word made a very big impression on me, much bigger than now, when we ourselves have seen what the jungles of India are really like. They’re not at all as exotic as they sound!

Of course we had some idea about the very rich and ancient culture of India, but here too our knowledge was rather remote. In conversations between Politburo members and Stalin, the question of our relations with India was often brought up, but Stalin paid no special attention to India, a disregard that

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was undeserved. A country like that ought to have attracted his attention. He underestimated its importance and evidently didn’t understand the events taking place there. The first time Stalin began to pay close attention to India was after it won its independence in [April] 1947. As for Nehru, at that time he preferred to have dealings directly not with the USSR but with China, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Burma. Although China soon came under the leadership of the Communist Party [in 1949], certain hopes continued to exist among some political leaders of the various countries that the developmental road taken by the new society in China would not be fully socialist. Of course in Beijing they stated quite definitely that they were Communists and were taking the road of socialist construction.

This didn’t frighten Nehru at all, apparently, not at that stage of his political activity. I’m not attributing views to Nehru that he openly stated. I’m merely drawing my own conclusions. Soon Tito visited India [in 1954]. He sailed there [in his presidential yacht] and on the way back stopped to visit in Cairo.3 Tito was the first of all the leaders of the socialist camp in Europe to blaze the trail to India. But Tito’s attitude toward India was also different [from ours]. At that time after all Tito was an opponent of Stalin’s, and we had labeled him “anti-Communist.” Supposedly he had sold out to our enemies, had gone over to the side of American imperialism, and renounced the building of socialism. All sorts of untruths about him were being written at that time.

From the reports about India that happened to appear in the Soviet newspapers it seemed that India had chosen the capitalist path of development. There was nothing to indicate socialist construction in that country. And we felt repelled by that.

On the other hand, Nehru was clearly aspiring to establish a democratic system of government.

Yet we couldn’t understand why he took such a patient and tolerant attitude toward the British, who had formerly enslaved his country. British officers continued to serve in the Indian army, and British officials still held posts here and there in India. That put us on our guard. They say that the Russian soul is like this: if you’re going to drink, then drink your fill; if you’re going on a binge, go all out; and if you’re going to fight, then fight till you win. The Indian leaders waged their struggle by different methods. As for the good intentions clearly shown by the policies of Nehru’s government, while they did not win our sympathies, we at least became more favorably disposed toward them. Unquestionably the Indian people enjoyed special respect in the USSR because they had formerly been oppressed by the colonialists and had now achieved their liberation. But we were not so favorably disposed toward

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India’s leadership. We were not impressed very much [at first] when Nehru, Zhou Enlai, and Sukarno, who were representing the three largest Asian countries that had recently won their independence, gathered at Bandung in Indonesia and worked out a common platform, a Bandung declaration. What this statement came down to was that it was necessary to struggle for peaceful coexistence, to exert every effort to avoid war. This Bandung platform was published in our newspapers. Stalin read it and approved of it.4 I remember once when we were chatting in a relaxed atmosphere, a time when Stalin was in a good mood, he made a kind of passing mention of this declaration, saying: “Not a bad declaration. If they had presented it to us, we would have been glad to sign it.”

Stalin was dying. We were not yet prepared to conduct foreign policy on our own without him. In the last years of his life he displayed great dissatisfaction with us. He said that we would perish, that the imperialists would strangle us, that we were mere babes, sucklings, puppies. After Stalin’s death it was as though we had been left on a desert island. We had no experience in diplomatic relations with the capitalist countries aside from Molotov. Only Molotov had been initiated into the mysteries of contacts with representatives of the capitalist countries.5 But his authority with the rest of us was not indisputable, and he certainly couldn’t make unilateral decisions about the nature of relations between the USSR and the capitalist states. Now [after Stalin’s death] we wanted to be “in the know” ourselves, not to be treated any longer as “beardless youths,” not just to hear proposals made by the Foreign Ministry or hear about the specifics of international problems from that ministry [headed by Molotov]. Molotov did remain an authority for us, but one with whom we were not fully satisfied. We wanted to see with our own eyes and feel with our own hands, in order to decide more correctly the nature of our contacts with the capitalist world, which we approached from strictly class positions. We were ready to fight them to defend our motherland. This was a lesson we had learned well, having passed through the painful school of history. Now, however, we wanted to establish closer contacts, taking into account not only theory but the reality that had actually taken shape. We lived in capitalist encirclement, but we had to have contacts and we had to make some arrangements with the capitalist world, to develop economic and diplomatic relations. But how? Among us the only one, other than Molotov, who had ever been abroad was Mikoyan, and even his trips abroad had been of brief duration.6 He had a better idea of life outside our country than the rest of us, because none of us in practice had actually seen living “Amerikenny.” That’s what the guerrilla fighters in Vsvelod Ivanov’s play Armored

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Train 14–69 called the American soldier they had captured.7 It was not exactly the same, but we were similar to those guerrilla fighters in our lack of knowledge of our adversaries. Of course we had seen some of them. We had met Eisenhower, Eden, and de Gaulle. De Gaulle had come to visit us after the war, but we had only seen these people, and we had viewed all those contacts from our own special prejudiced position of mistrust, from the point of view that a new war might be inevitable. Now we wanted something more and different.

Diplomatic relations between the USSR and India were established while Stalin was still alive. Who was the first ambassador from India to our country? As I recall, it was [Sarvapalli] Radhakrishnan, a gaunt, thin man who was already well on in years. Later he became the president of India after the death of then-President [Rajendra] Prasad.8 Radhakrishnan was an intelligent man and a good friend of ours. He had a degree in philosophy. Good memories have remained with me from our conversations with him in India and later when he came to visit us. As I recall, he was for a time the head of a peace organization, and he looked to our country for guidance on social questions.

During the years when I was in the leadership, the ambassador from India, who I greatly respected and still respect today, was a very fine and decent man, Krishna Menon.9 He did everything he could so that we would get to know India better, and by the example of his behavior he won our hearts for India and its people. I had many conversations with him and was always pleased by the meetings I had with this extraordinarily likable, pleasant, and intelligent man. He was a true son of his people, and he knew how to establish businesslike relations with the government of the country to which he was ambassador. His wife was also a remarkable person. The very best memories of her have remained with me and my comrades of that time. We met her frequently at diplomatic receptions.

The year 1954 arrived. Since Stalin’s death we had succeeded only in signing a trade treaty with India. But at that point Prime Minister Nehru made an official visit to our county [in June 1955].10 He was accompanied by his daughter, Indira Gandhi, who later became prime minister.11 We showed Nehru everything that he wanted to see. In doing this, we had certain reasons of our own. We wanted him to see everything as it actually was, without embellishments. Of course we wanted him to see the best things and to have a favorable impression of our Soviet land. We wanted him to see how, guided by Marxist-Leninist theory, we had put that theory into practice, and what results we had achieved in building socialism. After all, this was our opportunity to show him such things concretely. Nehru traveled around and saw a

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significant part of the USSR, including Central Asia and other places. My impression was that he had a high regard for our achievements.

We also had official talks with him. These went splendidly. Nehru knew how to leave a good impression of himself, and in all contacts with others he showed that he had an exceptional mind. Nevertheless, when we parted, each of us still held to his own opinion about the desirable paths for development of our respective countries, and as a result our former attitude toward Nehru did not fundamentally change. As before, we viewed him with great respect and valued him highly, but in our view he was a man with a particular frame of mind, a particular culture, and particular views, and essentially that was correct. After all, he was not a Marxist. The path he chose for the betterment of his country was a very long and slow one, and no one knew where it would lead. At that time and later, without saying so openly but by our actual behavior, we contrasted the achievements made by People’s China to the path [that India was taking]. That is, for all of Asia, including India, China should serve as the example, because in a short time it had achieved so much. The Indians themselves realized that China was moving ahead of them. We wanted India to develop heavy industry and raise the living standards of its people, but not by the methods and policies that Nehru was proclaiming, because such goals were not achievable that way, and the people of India would be doomed for many years to an impoverished existence.

Outwardly our official talks with Nehru went smoothly. He praised Soviet achievements, but not once did he say anything to the effect that our experience might to some extent be transferable to Indian conditions, and he gave us reason to think that this was not what he wanted. For our part, we didn’t make a peep about such things because we didn’t want to be imposing our view of the world on him.

Later Nehru invited an official delegation from the USSR to visit India. And we went to India in [November–December] 1955.12 In our country it was winter when we left for India, but in their country hot summer was still blazing away. India after all is India. It is not like the central zone of Russia in the USSR and not even like Sochi [in the semitropical Black Sea coastal area by the Caucasus Mountains]. The hot and humid climate of India varies to some degree in the different provinces of India, but by our standards it is all just unbearably hot.

The invitation from Nehru stated that Bulganin, chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers, and Khrushchev, member of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet, were being invited. We accepted with pleasure. We wanted to visit India, get to know its people, and observe its culture and everyday

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life. A fairly substantial delegation was put together. It included representatives of our Foreign Ministry and of our Central Asian republics. We wanted the Indians to see Soviet citizens of various nationalities, religious beliefs, and cultures.

We decided to make our trip by plane. The planes we had at that time were not the best. We decided on an Ilyushin-14 (IL-14), a new twin-engine plane and the one able to carry the heaviest loads.13 Today we know that that was merely a stage in the development of passenger aircraft, a thing of yesteryear. We had nothing to brag about in this respect, because we were lagging behind the West [in the development of passenger aircraft], but we had no other choice. We flew by way of Tashkent,14 where we refueled, and from there without landing again we came to Delhi. We took into account the timing specified by the Indian government. An official delegation was flying in, and all sorts of government ceremonies had been arranged. Therefore we should arrive at a particular time so as not to disrupt the ceremonies that had been prepared.

In Delhi my first encounter with India made an unbelievable impression on me. It’s hard for a Russian to imagine what we encountered. It’s a very warm climate, and the people are dark-skinned almost to the point of being black, and there is an endless variety of clothing, differing in costliness and elegance. Some people looked like impoverished beggars, and next to them would be people dressed luxuriously. There were rich colors and styles in the outer garments of every kind. The men’s headwear (white or green) made a vivid impression on the observer, as did the beards woven into many little braids. It all seemed fantastic to us, like a theatrical performance.

Our welcome was also incredible, with the warmest, friendliest, most benevolent, and fraternal attitude being expressed toward the new arrivals. We saw nothing like this in any other country on the part of the people and prime minister. We went to the residence assigned to the Soviet delegation, the presidential palace that had been previously occupied by the British governor, the king’s viceroy in India. Prasad was the president of India then, an elderly man of gloomy appearance. His gloomy outward aspect apparently reflected his inner nature. We received information that his attitude toward our delegation was very unfriendly. We were told that he was displeased by the fact that we were being housed in the presidential palace. First, we were Communists. Second, he was a very religious man and did not eat meat. His comments were relayed to us: “They have put the Russians there, and they are going to make a foul mess of my palace. They are going to eat meat there, not to mention drinking alcohol.” I did see Indians drinking alcoholic

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beverages, but that was an exception. Apparently some Indians had the idea that Russians were constantly sucking down vodka. So Prasad was expressing his concern. Of course he said nothing about this to us directly. When we visited him, he received us appropriately, but all our meetings with him remained purely official with an emphatically dry tone. Our meetings with Nehru were quite different.

We arrived at the presidential palace, which, as I have said, had been built for the viceroy of India. Everything there was magnificent and solidly built. The square in front of the palace was also remarkable. There were green well-trimmed lawns of the British type all around. Everything in the city breathed of the richness of life and made a powerful impression. This of course was New Delhi. I did not visit Old Delhi.15 We were not taken there. But some of the people on our staff told us that if you had a look at Old Delhi, only then could you get a better picture of the daily life of the Indian people. After all, we came into closest contact mainly with representatives of the government, well-known public figures, and intellectuals, that is, with people of a fairly high level of culture and personal development, including in the clothes they wore. You could not imagine, judging by them, the disastrous, impoverished situation in which the mass of the Indian people lived.

The number of days we would stay in India had been previously arranged, and correspondingly an itinerary had been worked out. Visits to the cities of Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras16 were planned for us; a visit to the Indian Parliament with the right to address that body; a visit to the construction site of a hydroelectric power plant, a coalmining region, and a machine-building plant. It was also proposed that we visit the jungles and even take a ride on an elephant. We agreed. After all, it was so exotic. Maybe getting up on the back of an elephant was something we shouldn’t do, but we thought that India without elephants and elephants without India were simply inconceivable. And if we refused the kind offer of the Indian leaders, we would be showing disrespect for local traditions, showing that we were either ignorant or to some extent insulting. We didn’t want that. And what would it cost us to get up on an elephant? They put a little stepladder up next to it; we climbed up on the elephant, and then rode for a few meters on its back. It was purely symbolic, not a real jungle expedition.

A number of other meetings were arranged, or what we might call receptions for civil society. At these the hosts spoke first, and then an opportunity for the guests to speak was provided. After the official meetings that we held in Delhi with Nehru and the members of his government, we went for a trip around the country. We were accompanied on our trip by [General Ivan]

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Serov,17 who was responsible for our safety. He established contact with the Indian minister of internal affairs and found his way into various nooks and crannies into which we were not invited and to which it was not appropriate to invite us. Serov said that there were places where hungry and homeless people gathered, where every morning dozens of corpses were picked up from the gutters and taken off for burial, so we shouldn’t judge India only by the official receptions and the people we met there. Another India existed, living miserably in slums and dying in them. It was as though there were two Indias, and one was not at all like the other.

Relations of trust were established between Nehru and us. By the way, even Nehru thought that Russians couldn’t live without alcoholic drinks. Therefore he decided to “be attentive toward us,” providing, so to speak, familiar conditions of existence. On his behalf we were told that since Indians didn’t use alcoholic beverages, only cold drinks and juice would be served at banquets, but for those of us who wished, a special room would be available off to the side (they pointed it out to us) behind some curtains with fruit and any alcoholic drinks we wanted from vodka to cognac to champagne. Whenever we wanted, we could go into that little room and take advantage of everything there as we wished. In reply we thanked him and said: “You can shut down that room. We’re not going in there. We’re very happy to accept your ways and customs.” Their customs were very much to my liking, and I addressed the following remarks to Nehru: “The fact that you don’t drink alcohol is more than intelligent. It is such a hot climate here that if a person drank alcohol, regardless of how little, I don’t know how he could hold up under these conditions.” None of us of course wore a path to that little room. I forbade everyone even to look in that direction. In spite of all that we still offended President Prasad because we ate beef and befouled his palace with this forbidden meat.

There are a great many vegetarians among the Indians. We were warned that we would see small red roses on the tables. They were set beside the place of a vegetarian, and those who did the serving, taking note of the roses, brought only vegetable dishes to those places. Subsequently we observed this custom in all the cities where dinners were given in our honor. I don’t remember if fish was served to those people. Krishna Menon [India’s ambassador to the USSR, Kumar Menon], to whom I have already referred, was very strict in his observance of national traditions. When he was living in the USSR he would not even eat caviar, because it came from a living organism. In this connection I don’t remember what his attitude was toward eggs.18 It’s true that most vegetarians I’ve met were people with good incomes, and they could

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allow themselves this freedom to choose what they would eat. They were not cutting coal or digging iron ore. When your organism is exhausted by heavy labor, protein is necessary to restore your strength. I don’t know if there were vegetarians among Indians employed in heavy physical labor. As everyone knows, Count Leo Tolstoy also became a vegetarian in his old age. Russian workers at the beginning of the [twentieth] century used to make wry comments: “He’s a count, so of course he can go without eating meat.” He could, if he wished, buy twenty different varieties of cheese. But take a worker, for example. If he didn’t buy a pound of meat (which cost about 15 kopecks in my day), he would have had to pay a much higher price for vegetarian foods. I have made a digression, commenting on matters of social class, and departing from the main subject.

After the scheduled meetings and official talks we traveled around India, and the best possible conditions were arranged for us. We managed to see everything they wanted to show us. I’m not saying this because I think they had something they wanted to hide, but because previously we had known really nothing about India and so we had no special desires. We were happy to be acquainted with everything in the order they showed it to us. We relied entirely on Prime Minister Nehru’s judgment.

We flew by plane from one city to another, and within each state of India we traveled by car. I was surprised by the low level of agricultural development. It was simply incredible, much lower than what I remember in my native village or in other rural areas of tsarist Russia. In Russia they had iron plows and harrows, and the owners of large landed estates had steam-driven threshing machines. In India we would see a water buffalo or more rarely a pair of buffaloes pulling a kind of wooden plow. The Indian farmer was barely scratching the surface, plodding along behind his buffalo—and that was called agriculture.

I watched rice being harvested. It was not a bad harvest. This was apparently because they plant the rice in the water. Therefore when they dig into the soil and then plant the seedlings by hand, the good climatic conditions take effect. There is plenty of warmth, water, and light, and the result is a good harvest. From the density of the spikes, or ears, of rice grains in each stand of rice plants, it was evident that a fairly good harvest had resulted. How did they do the harvesting? In some places I myself picked up a scythe and did some reaping (though not rice, of course). I wanted to show that we Soviet people are people of labor. We know what labor is, and we can handle a scythe. That made a very big impression on them. I could no longer wield a scythe for a long time, but I knew which end to pick it up from and how to swing it

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for best effect. Although I’m an industrial worker, I lived for some time in the countryside, and although I was never employed as a reaper, I somehow or other did manage to try my hand at reaping. My general impression of agriculture in India was that it was awful.

We also visited some machine-building plants. They corresponded to modern-day requirements in technology. To me this was understandable. The capitalists know production methods, and competition forces them to make use only of such equipment as is required by necessity in order to make a profit from the capital invested in the business. We also visited the construction site of a hydroelectric power plant [Bhakra-Nangal in the Punjab].19

The plant was being built on the basis of technology that was at a lower level than ours, even though a British company was doing the construction. A British engineer explained: “We have [usually] used a higher level of technology when we built hydroelectric plants, not to mention greater plant capacity.” But in this case irrigation work was being done. A dam had been built to collect water for irrigation, and it was only incidentally that a turbine was installed to produce electric power.

In this state [Punjab] the chief minister was a Muslim,20 and the religious adherence of the local officials left its imprint on the way public administration was organized in that state. In India religious superstition is very strong. When we visited the leaders of that state we were made sharply aware that they were Muslims. To be sure, I met no Muslims there who had a disrespectful attitude toward Nehru. He had the sympathy of the people in all the states of India with the exception of Bombay. In Bombay [Morarji] Desai21 was running things. Nehru was already having difficulties with him at that time. Desai pursued a reactionary policy and aspired to a high position in India’s central government.

Then we went to Madras. It’s a very clean city, as most seaside cities are in general. It was also covered with greenery because of the huge number of fruit trees and other plants that flourished in that southern climate. We were charmed by all this. We found ourselves in a fantastic world. The only thing that sobered us up was the fact that there was extreme luxury on one side and savage poverty on the other. This sharp differentiation in India struck you in the eye immediately. It’s true that many factories have been built there and a section of the people have begun to live better, but millions of citizens of that country live in a state of semi-starvation.

A public meeting or rally organized on the outskirts of a city was engraved in my memory. Bulganin and I went there in an open convertible and were caught in a heavy downpour. The water was not cold, but we were soaked to the skin. As we drove along, the wind cut us like a knife. Nikolai Aleksandrovich

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[Bulganin] caught a cold. We made a joke of him. We said you had to have especially good luck to catch cold in the heat of India! Here he was, a man from the north, and he couldn’t stand the rain in the south of India! We went there with the governor of the state.22 Members of the former nobility, or maharajahs, mainly occupied the gubernatorial posts. I have never met such a large fat man as he was. There was barely room in the automobile for him alone, yet all three of us were supposed to sit in it. The governor had us sit out on the edges while he squatted in the middle of the seat. We made a lot of jokes about that too later on when we reminisced about our meeting with this “vast, unencompassable” individual.

All the public rallies proceeded in the same fashion. Our hosts would speak, and then we would be given the floor. Bulganin would give a speech or I would, or other Soviet speakers would take the floor. All the speeches were friendly and welcoming. After the rally the local authorities would organize concerts out in the open. We listened to and saw singers, dancers, and storytellers. Their exotic clothing and ways of dancing and singing were also novelties for us. Neither Bulganin nor I had ever encountered dancing or singing of this type. Sometimes acrobatic performances would be held for us. All this made a powerful impression, but to speak frankly we had a poor understanding of the underlying meaning of what we were being shown. It was weighted down with Hindu symbolism, and since we couldn’t follow it, we became terribly tired. In Madras one of the local leaders was sitting next to me at a concert. He later organized a reactionary religious-based political party.23 I have been told that previously he was a close friend of Gandhi, the “father of the nation.” He walked around in a kind of loincloth without a shirt. The color of his skin was rather yellow, and he was tall and thin like a lizard, and his bones stuck out sharply under his skin. His face had an emaciated, ascetic appearance. This ascetic man kept talking to me during the performance, giving me no chance to follow the course of the concert and enjoy it. He even asked me: “Did you want to listen and watch?” I understood that he was just trying to entertain me, and it was awkward for me to tell him the truth, that I would rather he didn’t bother me. So I answered: “I’m glad to listen to what you have to say.”

He began to give an account of his understanding of India’s future path of development. He also told a lot about himself. It turned out he had held a prominent religious position when India was a colony of Britain and later was a governor-general during the transition period after Britain had decided to leave India and grant it its independence. He argued that India should not take the Soviet Union as an example for its development, that large factories

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could not be built in India, that industrialization in general was not a good thing for India. In his opinion, if large factories were brought into this heavily populated country, the high level of mechanization and automation would result in a mass of working people being driven into the army of the unemployed, and poverty would only increase. He stuck to the Gandhian ideal: the spinning wheel was the only industry needed. The national flag of India has a spinning wheel depicted on it, the idea being that only handicraft labor or the labor of artisans can be the basis for progress in India. I don’t know if he was familiar with the science of political economy. Of course he didn’t have even a smattering of knowledge about Karl Marx, and he didn’t want to have any. It would have left quite an unbearable taste in his mouth.

I assume that he subjected me to this conversation because of the public meeting that had been held in Madras, where Bulganin and I had taken turns speaking. I spoke there about the industrialization of our country and about the advantages of heavy industry. The chief minister of that state was also one of this man’s supporters, and after I spoke this minister took the floor a second time.24 I understood from the translation of his speech that without naming me personally or polemicizing against me directly, he was disputing what I had said. He argued that India should take its own path, with manual labor and the workshops of handicraftsmen. He too placed great emphasis on the fact that they had such a large population, and mechanization would only increase the number of unemployed. This line of thought, although it is totally false, has quite a few supporters in India.

In spite of all this, at all the public rallies we took as our subject the condemnation of the colonial system and of the aggressive forces that had pursued colonialist policies and were continuing to pursue them. We pointed out that the disastrous situation in which the Indian people found themselves was the result of many years under colonial oppression, the result of being robbed by the colonialist monopolies, who achieved their prosperity at the expense of the people. These ideas were very well received everywhere. As soon as we began talking about them, the people would cheer us loudly.

The anticolonialist trend of our speeches was not phrased abstractly but was directed specifically against the British colonialists. It seemed to me that Nehru and Indira Gandhi did not approve of this sharp and direct tendency, but they didn’t say anything to us, nor did they indicate in any way that we were abusing their hospitality by presenting our ideas. But we sensed that [that was their attitude]. Nevertheless we continued to make sharply pointed speeches as before, and the people liked it. We were speaking out as Communists. At the same time I should say that the authority of the USSR was very

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high. According to the schedule that had been worked out, we were supposed to go to Bombay, a major port city. Disturbances between different religious communities were going on in the city at that time, and there were casualties. Things reached the point where there was fighting in the streets.25 The situation in Bombay was explained to us, but we were asked not to change our itinerary. Nehru thought it would be useful if we went there. The fact that there were disturbances was an internal matter, and Nehru thought that both sides in the dispute would come out to greet us and give us a very hearty welcome, so that our arrival would contribute to pacification of the situation and an end to the disturbances. So we flew to Bombay.

As we drove from the airport to the residence assigned to us, so many people came out to greet us that all the streets were jammed full. We literally had to inch our way through the crowds. People jumped onto the cars in which we were riding, stood on the running boards, reached out their hands to touch our clothing. In the end such a large number of people had piled up on the car that they weighed it down and put it out of commission. General Serov was accompanying us here, too. He was in charge of our bodyguards together with an authorized representative from the Indian government. Nehru had adopted this man into his family when he was just a young child and had raised him. He was a very fine fellow. Serov reported to us that the very best and most trusting relations had been established between them. This fellow made his way over to us, jumping on the roofs of automobiles, and made the following recommendation: “There is a police car up ahead with bars on the windows. That’s the only possible way to get through to your residence. There’s no other way. I think that you will understand us correctly and forgive us for making such a proposal. It’s only for the sake of your security.” So that‘s what we did [got in the police car] and were soon lost from the sight of the crowd. People kept hunting for us, looking in the windows of cars, and finally they saw that we were riding in a police car. They all rushed toward the police car, but they were too late because we had already caught up with those who were driving up ahead of us. The people who met us were dumbfounded. They couldn’t imagine that such an important delegation would arrive in a car with iron bars on the windows.

So then, we reached our residence safely. The heat and humidity were unbearable. We were advised to lie in tubs full of cold water, but they only called it cold water because it hadn’t been specially heated. Then we hurried to an official reception [at the governor’s palace]. The leaders of that state, headed by the local premier, Morarji Desai, and the governor, had organized the reception in our honor. We were informed that outside the palace everything

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was jam-packed. People were sitting in the streets and on the city squares and on the sidewalks, and it was impossible to get through. They were shouting slogans of friendship: Hindi, Russi, Bhai, Bhai, which meant “Indians and Russians are brothers.” They sat there all night, and we could hear their chanting from our palace. The reception had to be canceled. Although we were distressed by this, it did give us the opportunity to have a real rest. By morning the crowd had dispersed, and we set about the events that had been scheduled. Bombay’s magnificent aquarium has remained in my memory. Of course we had a look at the entire city and drove through its suburbs as well. But we didn’t go on foot; we saw it all from cars.

Then Nehru flew into the city and invited us to visit a dairy farm with water buffalo, since that was a type of livestock farming that we didn’t have in our country. A session for tasting the milk at the farm had been arranged. In the southern part of the USSR we have water buffalo, but for the most part they are draft animals and they don’t give much milk. But the milk yield of these animals in Bombay was excellent. The fat content of the milk was 7 percent, which was simply incredible! It was rather unpleasant to drink it in the raw; there was too much fat in it and it was sickly sweet. They had a mechanical process for removing the fat and reducing the fat content to 3 percent, at which point it became more acceptable to our taste. We had a long, thorough talk with the governor, a man of middle age. Four of us took part in this talk: three of our people [Khrushchev, Bulganin, and their interpreter] and the governor. Only on our side was there an interpreter. The governor sought to demonstrate to us that he was a progressive man with a sympathetic attitude toward the USSR, although he was not a Communist but belonged to the party of Nehru.26

On the other hand, Desai, the prime minister of this state, had a hostile attitude toward us; he had been opposed altogether to our being invited to Bombay. We also met with him, but our conversations were purely of a formal nature. Later I met Desai again. He remained true to himself and to his reactionary views. To this day he is the leader of the opposition to the reforms that the present prime minister, Indira Gandhi, is trying to carry out. He and I understood each other quite well, but our views stood in absolute opposition. He firmly supported a pro-American policy and held that India should develop in the classical capitalist pattern. The governor of that state, about whom I’ve already spoken, held a different position. Naturally we treated him with greater sympathy. At rallies in Bombay and elsewhere we were greeted with great enthusiasm. The people were hailing us and giving their greetings

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to the Soviet Union as represented by us. They were expressing their warmest, most ardent feelings.

Later our hosts began a discussion with us about traveling to Kashmir. When our itinerary was first drawn up, they had wanted to include a trip to Kashmir, but we asked them not to do that, because a military confrontation with Pakistan had developed over Kashmir. In the population of Kashmir Muslims predominated, and Pakistan insisted that Kashmir should become part of Pakistan. In fact, as a result of military action, part of Kashmir did become part of Pakistan.27 We didn’t want to complicate relations between India and Pakistan by our presence in Kashmir, nor did we want to link ourselves with India’s claims to Kashmir. We felt it was better for us to take a neutral position. Let them work out these disputed questions among themselves. The Indians made an especially emphatic appeal to us to support their position, but we were not impressed by that at all. On the other hand we didn’t want to cause distress for Nehru by our refusal. Our sympathies were on his side, on the side of India, if only because India had taken an intelligent position on international questions, did not belong to any military bloc, and had a sympathetic attitude toward the Soviet Union.

Pakistan took an opposite position. It had joined the military bloc of SEATO (South East Asia Treaty Organization). This military organization was directed mainly against the Soviet Union. It was more to our advantage, strictly speaking, to support India and to strengthen friendly relations with that country. We had no friendly relations with Pakistan at all. We believed that potentially some seeds of friendship might have been sown, but they had been suppressed by the reactionary forces and not given a chance to grow. Someday they would sprout and grow, and relations with Pakistan and the various peoples of that country would become friendly, as they were with the peoples of India, but for the time being that was not the case. We consulted among ourselves and decided to agree to Nehru’s request and make the visit to Kashmir. This happened during the last stage of our visit to India.

Before we went to Kashmir we went to the state of Kerala. Soon after that the Communists established their government in Kerala. To be sure, it didn’t last long. A Communist government was elected there a second time after I had already been retired. To put it briefly, the Communists were strong in that state.28 You couldn’t tell from the reactions of the crowd at mass rallies how many Communist Party members there were in one or another state of India. Obvious sympathy for the Soviet Union was displayed or expressed everywhere, regardless of what the balance of forces in government elections

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in any state might have been. Even in Bombay where the premier was Desai the people treated us affectionately and displayed warm friendship. One thing about Kerala that has remained in my memory was the endless rows of palm trees being grown commercially. Coconuts were harvested from them. We were shown how that was done. People scrabbled skillfully up the trunks of the trees. Their feet were bound with rope and seemed to stick to the tree trunks. Then from the treetops they would throw down the coconuts.

We were also shown tea plantations in Kerala. A capitalist with a mediumsized business invited us to visit his plantation. We inspected his plantation and observed the harvesting, drying, and processing of the tea leaves. Previously in my life I had seen this done in Soviet Georgia. What we saw in Kerala made a sorry impression. Everything was done by hand; then the leaves were thrown in a heap on the ground. (In our country we already had machines that cut the tops from the tea bushes.29) I joked: “If Soviet citizens who drink Indian tea could see how it’s processed, they’d probably lose their appetite for it.” In our country the sanitary standards are stricter at tea plantations. There was nothing like that in Kerala. But the owner gave us a very polite reception and treated us to tea and fruit.

We saw a huge number of monkeys in that state. As we traveled along the road, the monkeys, who are quite accustomed to humans, lined up along the sides. As soon as the car stopped, they rushed toward it, because they were accustomed to having the tourists treat them, and they would look at a person as though they were expecting a treat. There were even more monkeys crowded on top of an ancient temple, a huge building in the shape of a bell, which in India is considered the holy palace of the monkeys. To the Indians the monkeys are sacred and are protected. These creatures, which exist by the millions, have become a disaster for agriculture. They knock down cornstalks and destroy fruit, but the Indians will not lift a hand against the monkeys.

In Kerala we visited a respected fellow countryman of ours, the great artist Svyatoslav Roerich. His father [Nikolai Roerich] had also been a famous artist, and his paintings were on display at an exhibit in Moscow. I had visited that exhibit as one of many. Roerich had been living in India for a long time.30 His wife was Indian, and he had put down solid roots there. When we met and I took a look at him, I was amazed. His face had a great resemblance to that of Tsar Nicholas II. His beard was trimmed the same way, and he was the same height. I am judging from portraits I was used to seeing in the prerevolutionary days. Back then every school and textbook had portraits of the tsar. As for Roerich himself, he turned out to be an extremely pleasant and peaceable man.

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Without our noticing, the time had crept up when we were to fly to Kashmir. You had to cross all of India from south to north, going up close to Afghanistan. Afghanistan doesn’t border directly on Kashmir, because part of Pakistani territory separates India and Afghanistan. We didn’t have enough fuel to fly directly to Kashmir; we had to land along the way. A local maharajah came out to greet us at the place where we landed.31 There were no public meetings or rallies there. We were housed in a very rich mansion. The maharajah arranged a dinner in our honor and then invited us to a concert. The musicians had previously been either his slaves or his serfs. He had remained their master right up until the British were driven out of the country. His wife was French. He introduced her to us. Her appearance aroused sympathy. She gave the impression somehow of a person in chains, under constraint. She didn’t behave like a hostess, and you could sense that inwardly she felt oppressed. But she was very polite toward us. I suddenly had the impression that she was going to make an appeal to us [for help]. In material respects she had no restrictions. She lived in luxury, but in her heart she felt oppressed. We were told that this maharajah had several other wives. When we were sitting on the veranda in the evening relaxing, we were shown another palace far off in the hills. (You could barely make out the structure in the distance.) His first wife was kept locked up in that palace.

The maharajah introduced us to his son, a young man who was an officer in the Indian army. He served as an adjutant to the president of the country. This was their way of showing honor to the offspring of the nobility. The maharajah was a well-built man of stately bearing, about 45 years old, a skilled horseman and sportsman. He organized some sporting contests in our honor. This was the first time I had seen such competitive sports on horseback. Each rider carried a long stick with a net on the end with which to catch the ball.32 Whoever had the ball tried to gallop the length of the field to get the ball past the other side’s goalposts. We were told that when the British still ruled in India the maharajah personally took part in this sport and was the captain of his team. When they had gone to England to compete, he had fallen off his horse and broken his arm. Now we were watching this game. The father and son ended up on different teams. The horses they had were remarkable. They sped up and down the field like whirlwinds. The players changed horses every 15 minutes; otherwise they couldn’t keep up the pace. The game was concluded safely without any casualties.

In the evening the maharajah asked Bulganin and me: “Are you hunters?” I answered him: “Back home in our country, yes, we do go hunting.”

He became very eager:“If you want, I’ll organize a tiger hunt for you, all right?”

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We thanked him for his attentiveness but replied that we didn’t have the time. He wouldn’t drop the subject: “Come on,” he said, “Stay for another day!” I must confess that although I was curious, I didn’t want to make bad

publicity for the USSR or myself, to have people say, “You went there to go tiger hunting.”

We flew from there to Kashmir. We were given a grand welcome by the population. It’s mainly Muslim, and the chief minister is also a Muslim.33 The governor was a very handsome young man, the son of a former maharajah.34 A boating expedition on a large lake in picturesque surroundings was organized for us.35 As for the outward appearance of the citizenry, it left us with a dreary impression. People were dressed poorly, and their clothing was drabber than in the south. Maybe it only seemed that way to us because it was hot in the south and you could wear light-colored garments. All the young people, especially the women, had worn brightly colored clothing [in the south]. But here it was colder. Sometimes there was even freezing weather. And the people had to dress more warmly. But what was visible from their clothing was their poverty, or to put it more bluntly, their state of destitution. Nevertheless their attitude toward us was splendid. Everything was done so that we would feel welcome and well disposed toward them. The names of the local inhabitants were often similar to Uzbek names. We invited them to visit Uzbekistan. It was pleasant to be a guest there because they too didn’t serve alcoholic beverages. The food we were treated to was very tasty, especially the “lula-kabob,” which had a lot of pepper and strong spices but was very well cooked.

When the usual public rally began, we used some of the same speeches we had prepared earlier, but with sentences inserted that spoke in favor of India and not of Pakistan, that is, we spoke from the point of view that this state belonged to India, taking the position of the Indian government. When we arrived in Kashmir Indira Gandhi was already there. The fact that she had flown there was to us a sign of special respect. She was, as it were, representing her father, Nehru.

We consulted with her about the content of the speeches. Our speeches were then broadcast. Indira Gandhi greatly appreciated our position in support of India’s policy in its dispute with Pakistan. A little while later she told us that her father had called, not from Delhi, but from another place, sending us greetings and expressing great satisfaction with our speech.36 We were also satisfied, although we knew that Pakistan would not be pleased. But we had no direct contacts with Pakistan, and in fact the very worst relations existed between us. For our part, we wanted an improvement in those relations and did everything we could toward that end, but Pakistan went and joined military

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organizations that were directed against us [that is, SEATO and CENTO].37 And there was nothing we could do in that situation. The Pakistanis themselves had refused to take our hand offered to them in friendship.

Our position in solidarity with the Indians in their dispute with Pakistan contributed even more to the strengthening of friendly relations between the Soviet Union and India. I think this line taken by the USSR was correct, although I was always concerned that it might do harm to our future relations with Pakistan. We believed that a time would come when Pakistan would appreciate our policy properly and grasp the fact that it ought to make friends with the USSR, not the United States, because only the USSR would provide aid and assistance free of any self-seeking to the peoples who had freed themselves from colonial oppression. That is precisely what is being done in relation to India. If we talk about external indicators only, it’s true that Kashmir is not a native part of India. I am speaking conditionally here. In terms of geography and state borders it is part of India. It is a state within the country of India. But it is quite different in its natural features and in the appearance of the population. The natural conditions and the vegetation are more northerly. I saw apple trees and pear trees, and many other things that grow in our country, even in the central zone of Russia. To tell the truth, I’m afraid I might be making a mistake here because I wasn’t there for very long and didn’t have a chance to see much.38

We encountered many interesting things in India, which is truly a land of marvels. The Indians are a remarkable people, although extremely poor. But nature there is amazing! And the ancient monuments, the art and the architecture! All of this was new to us, amazing and delightful. It is enough to mention that great pearl of artistry, the Taj Mahal, the palace and tomb of [Mumtaz Mahal, deceased wife of] one of India’s rulers [Shah Jahan].39 Invariably every tourist visits this place, taking delight in the white stone structure, which doesn’t even seem to be of stone because the material is of such exceptional whiteness. Facing the structure is a reflecting pool. When you position yourself properly next to the pool, you see the fantastical reflection of the palace in the water.40 As a gift I was given an exact replica of the Taj Mahal made from alabaster. Feasting my eyes on it, I thought to myself: This was built in a century long past, yet to this day it bears witness to the high level of culture of the Indian people. On the other hand, when I looked at the poverty all around, the thought occurred to me that the rulers didn’t consider working people to be human, but forced them to erect palaces and mausoleums, leaving them to die from the heavy burden of their labors. The rulers didn’t take the people into account and had no regard for them. They

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only needed hands to do the work, and they squeezed the living juices out of their subjects. Today these buildings are the pride of India, monuments to its art. But they also tell the observer a story of slave labor. How many people were martyred so that these buildings could be erected?

When we finished inspecting the burial vault at the Taj Mahal, journalists immediately surrounded me and began asking me my impressions. I told them about the duality of my feelings, that I was of two minds. I felt delight and admiration for those who had designed this miracle of the arts, but I also felt displeasure at the way these people had wasted human energy not for the good of others but to glorify themselves or their loved ones, in this case the wife [Mumtaz] of the former ruler [Shah Jahan]. An enormous and richly embellished palace had been built by the same ruler a little bit off to the side [across a river from the tomb]. When his son41 overthrew him and seized power, he shut up his father in [a tower of] that palace and held him captive there. In that palace there was a place, an opening in the wall, through which in his declining years he could look out and see the structure he had built, this miracle of the arts. He could see it off in the distance from his place of captivity. We were also taken to that room in the tower, and sure enough, everything was visible from that location. But what kind of pleasure could that have given the man who built the Taj Mahal? What kind of fate was it for him as his life slowly ebbed away? After all, the man by whose order this marvelous tomb had been built could not go there. That must have made his existence in captivity even more bitter.

When we traveled around India, we encountered monuments along the way that had been erected by the colonizers in honor of their victories and their seizures of various territories in India. These were statues of various military commanders, both of naval and of ground forces, or other representatives of the British crown. And all these statues somehow got along with the world around them. The Indians are an amazing people; their patience is unbelievable. From our point of view we wondered how they could put up with these statues, which were constant reminders of their loss of independence and the oppression of their country by the British colonialists. After the revolution in our country we knocked down almost all the old statues. We left only a few with appropriate inscriptions as reminders of what our former oppressors had been like.

[To digress for a moment] it’s true that some statues and monuments were destroyed that should not have been. In the heat of the moment, right after the revolution, a statue of Admiral Nakhimov was destroyed in Sevastopol. Then later during the Great Patriotic War [1941–45] the Order of Nakhimov

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was introduced [by Stalin]!42 Anything can happen of course when such a profound social upheaval takes place as the one that occurred in October 1917 in our country. The saying, “When you chop wood, chips fly,” truly applies to that situation. Nakhimov had been an admiral, and almost all the admirals and generals of the old regime had served to strengthen and reinforce the autocracy, which the people had overthrown. It was only later that the historical services and merits of Nakhimov in defense of Sevastopol [besieged by the British in 1854–55, during the Crimean War] were recognized and the Order of Nakhimov was introduced. I should say in passing that Stalin did this for “conjunctural” reasons. It was convenient at the time. He began to promote and eulogize Suvorov and Kutuzov, Ushakov and Nakhimov [and establish orders in their names].43 Their portraits were hung everywhere. At one time when I arrived in Moscow, I was amazed. What warehouse had they dug these things out of? Dirt had worked its way into these portraits so deeply you couldn’t dust it off or wash it away. These portraits would have been rarities in a museum. But Stalin wanted a visual way of influencing people. He wanted these portraits to have a striking effect on people when they got up close to them. As soon as the war ended, these portraits disappeared, although the corresponding orders remained on the chests of the military men awarded the orders of Suvorov, Kutuzov, Ushakov, and Nakhimov for bravery and skill in the war against Hitler.

Our visit to India culminated in one more mass rally. Nehru called it a reception in honor of the USSR in the name of the people of India. A speaker’s platform was set up on a huge, attractive city square. So many people gathered there would have been no place for an apple to fall among the crowd.44 People stood so closely jammed together that the entire huge crowd would sway as one, because the people in back were pushing in order to get closer to the speakers’ platform and the crowd swayed like ocean waves. I was afraid there might be casualties. Nehru, the members of his government, and his guests all took their places. Nehru, speaking over the radio, appealed to those present to sit down. He was also afraid that the crowd would become unruly, the people behind would press forward on the people in front, and someone might be crushed so badly they’d be unable to breathe. People began to sit down on the ground. Indira Gandhi came up and whispered something in her father’s ear. Again he appealed to those who had gathered: “I am an old man, and I thought it would be more comfortable for everyone to sit, but my daughter just reminded me that when the national anthem is sung it is obligatory to stand. And so I am asking you to stand up again while the national anthems are sung.” The people stood up, the national anthems of India and the Soviet

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Union were sung, and after that Nehru again asked everyone to sit down. This huge rally made a colossal impression. The public reacted ecstatically to all the speeches, especially when the friendship between our peoples was mentioned. There and everywhere in India the slogan was repeated: Hindi, Russi, Bhai, Bhai! (“Indians and Russians are brothers.”)

As a result of our talks with Nehru, I formed an impression of him as a cautious politician, unhurried and restrained. He seemed to me a man who wanted to see everything and hear everything but hold back from expressing his opinion on painful subjects. We were interested above all in his attitude toward the socialist system. For his part, Nehru never spoke definitively in favor of any system and stuck to the position, as it were, of a being a kind of democrat.

Nevertheless I think that Nehru, who had such great intelligence, sooner or later would have come to the conclusion that the only correct path was the path of socialist construction. Only by this road could his country and his people be freed from their impoverished condition. In my view it was necessary to show some patience, because even if we mentioned indirectly our understanding of what a governmental system should be, we would encounter resistance. He himself was leaning more and more toward socialism and began to express himself more and more definitely.45 Unfortunately death put an end to his political activity. With his death we lost a very great friend of the Soviet Union.

We visited India again when we were returning from Indonesia in spring 1960. Nehru suggested that we stop over in Calcutta.46 That meeting was a very warm one, as the previous ones had been. The usual huge public rally was held. It was toward evening. Leaders of that state of India gave speeches, and I did, too. The unvarying atmosphere of friendship toward the USSR has remained in my memory, the desire for peace throughout the world. During the meeting an unbelievable number of doves were released and allowed to fly away as a symbol of peace. After Picasso designed his famous dove of peace,47 it became a symbol on the banners of fighters for peace and peaceful coexistence among everyone on the earth. It was getting dark. These Calcutta doves circled over the heads of the crowd and came down to earth wherever they happened to be. One dove landed on my arm. The rally was still going on, and the dove made himself comfortable and sat there peacefully. A great many jokes were made after that, and of course the photographers and moviecamera people could not deny themselves the pleasure of recording that incident. Later at rallies in every country I happened to visit when I spoke out for peaceful coexistence, I would say: “That dove knew whose arm to sit on, the arm of Khrushchev.”

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Our talks in Calcutta [in 1960] did not differ in any special way from the earlier talks in 1955 that we’d held with leaders of other [Indian] states. The meetings and conversations were pleasant. The leader of the local government was not a young man, but a man of enormous size, a medical doctor by profession, and a very influential man in society. There was a very intelligent woman, also no longer young, who held a leading position in the city of Calcutta and who took an emphatically positive attitude toward the Soviet Union. It’s true that according to information that reached us the doctor I’ve mentioned had a more cautious attitude toward the USSR and personally held a position in opposition to Nehru, but during our meeting with him he did not express this in any way. On the contrary, he stressed his sympathy with the policies of our country.

The percentage of industrial workers in the population of Calcutta is quite large, and their presence is more noticeable than in other cities. But the local population was also poorer than elsewhere. Because these workers felt drawn toward Soviet workers (by common class bonds), the welcome our delegation received there was most cordial. The people expressed their feelings with great gusto. For several years now the left has been winning the majority in elections in Calcutta. Unfortunately the Communist Party is split there. One group calls itself Communist Party of India (Marxist), and the other calls itself simply Communist Party of India.48 This reflected the influence of the line that, against all common sense, the Chinese Communist Party and Mao Zedong were pursuing. It was Mao and his influence that achieved this split. After China’s armed attack on India [in 1959], this split was consolidated organizationally, but in 1960 [when Khrushchev was there] this was evident only to a relatively small extent as yet.

Let me repeat that I was very pleased by the warmth of the Indian traditions for welcoming guests. One more reception in our honor was organized in a large park, where tables were set up everywhere. The main thing for me again was the fact that juice was the only drink served and the hors d’oeuvres were fruit. This is the opposite of what we see in our country, where it’s said that without vodka you can have no fun. But in fact it was a gay and cheerful event in Calcutta; the music played, people walked around, sitting or standing in small groups and talking. The mood was excellent, friendly, warm, and welcoming. With us everything would have become loud and noisy, and there would have been a lot of shouting. It would also have been gay and cheerful and fun, but you would have come across people who had drunk too much. In India that was impossible. There, in such a situation, no one would forget his or her dignity or lose self-control.

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