AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

        Though Nehru was in Russia only for four days in 1927, yet he did not miss the opportunity of visiting Lenin's Mummy in Moscow. This new avatara of Ghengis Khan, who was responsible for seven million deaths in Russia, bewitched Nehru completely. Nehru writes: He lies asleep as it were and it is difficult to believe that he is dead. In life they say he was not so beautiful to look at. He had too much of common clay in him and about him was the smell of the Russian soil. But in death there is a strange beauty and his brow is peaceful and unclouded. On his lips there hovers a smile and there is a suggestion of pugnacity, of work done and success achieved. He has a uniform on and one of his hands is lightly clenched. Even in death he is the dictator. In India, he would certainly have been canonized, but saints are not held in repute in Soviet circles and the people of Russia have done him the higher honour of loving him as one of themselves. Nehru knew nothing about India at that time. I am unable to understand how he could believe that the Indian people would have hailed as a saint a mass murderer like Lenin.

        I am shocked to see from Nehru's book on Soviet Russia (1929) that he was bewitched by the criminal law and prison administration of Stalin's Russia: Our own visit to the chief prison in Moscow created a most favourable impression on our minds. As we were very much pressed for time, we were unable to see as much of the jail as we wanted to none the less, two facts stood out. One was that we had actually seen desirable and radical improvements over the old system prevailing even now in most countries and the second and even more important fact was the mentality of the prison officials, and presumably the higher officials of the Government also, in regard to jails. Anyone with a knowledge of prisons in India and of the barbarous way in which handcuffs, fetters and other punishments are used will appreciate that difference. The Governor of the prison in Moscow who took us round was all the time LAYING STRESS ON THE HUMAN SIDE OF JAIL LIFE. It can be said without a shadow of doubt that to be in a Russian Prison is far more preferable than to be a worker in an Indian factory, whose lot is ten to eleven hours work a day and then to live in a crowded and dark and airless tenement, hardly fit for an animal. The mere fact that there were some prisons like the one we saw is in itself something for the Soviet Government to be proud of.

        Nehru would have us earnestly believe that Stalin's Russia was more liberal and humane than Lord Irwin's India of 1927! I only wish the British Government of India had adopted the Soviet system of criminal law and administration, at least in so far as Pundit Nehru was concerned. In that happy event (according to Nehru's own poetic perceptions!!), he would have not had the glorious opportunity to write the voluminous amounts of what Sita Ram Goel aptly describes as 'abominable nonsense' he did in later years while serving short sentences in the cool comfort of Dehra Dun District jail.

        No one in the world has yet heard of a book written by a prisoner in a Soviet jail. The harsh truth is that even most of the prisoners have never been heard of once they went behind the bars in the Soviet Union. In any case, we have first hand accounts of inhuman conditions in Soviet jails from the few who were fortunate enough to come out alive. They tell a different and dismal story.

        What is laughable and comical, if not ludicrous, is that Nehru knew very well at that time itself that the cardinal truth about the Bolshevik butchers of Russia under Stalin had leaked out into the whole world. In view of this intellectual understanding, Nehru makes a strong recommendation to his readers to have cheerful recourse to larger doses of the dope which has paralysed his mind and understanding: I remember attending a banquet given by the scientists and professors in Moscow. There were people from many countries present and speeches in a variety of languages were made. I remember especially a speech given by a young student who had come from far off Uruguay in South America. He spoke in the beautiful and sonorous periods of the Spanish language and he told us that he was going back to his distant country with the red star of Soviet Russia engraved in his heart and carrying the message of social freedom to his young comrades in Uruguay.

        Such was the reaction of Soviet Russia on his young and generous heart. And yet there are many who tell us that Russia is a land of anarchy and misery and the Bolsheviks are assassins and murderers who have cast themselves outside the pale of human society.

        The known fact of history is that after Lenin's death, Stalin became the supreme dictator of Russia. According to Trotsky, Stalin did not create the machine, but he only took possession of it. A reign of terror began in early 1930 which defies the powers of description and really defies the imagination. Heads rolled by the thousands, the tens of thousands, probably even the hundreds of thousands. A process of terror and panic, mutual denunciation and mutual extermination, was set in motion which is probably without parallel in modern history. In a vast conflagration of mock justice, torture and brutality, at least two thirds of the governing class of Russia literally devoured and destroyed itself in the early 1930s even as Nehru was being tortured by British authorities in a hell of torture in Dehra Dun prison! The jailors and the judges of one day were the prisoners and victims of the next. And over this whole macabre procedure, Nehru's great hero Stalin, ever human and humane, presided, with diabolic, cynical composure, with his customary self-deprecating manner of having nothing to do with it all. Nehru could not have been unaware of the fact that the sadistic Stalin was enjoying every minute of it, relishing every new exhibition of the helplessness of his former aides and associates. For two years he let the conflagration proceed. Then when the turnover had gone far enough, with consummate skill, 'like one who thrusts rods into an atomic pile', he slowed down the process of destruction and brought it, relatively speaking, to a halt. One of the last to be shot was the Grand Inquisitor himself Yezhov. He belonged to that final category of those referred to in Russia as The witnesses, those who had to be killed because they had seen too much and knew too much.

        That was Stalin's Russia, so full of Communist mercy and compassion, where the landless meek inherited the earth! To the whole world Siberia was to Stalin's Russia, what Auschwitz was to Hitler's Germany. And yet Nehru gives a childish appraisal of Siberia with child-like enthusiasm: The Soviet Union is an exciting land with all these changes taking place from day to day and hour to hour. But no part of it is so exciting and fascinating as the desert Steppes of Siberia and the Old-World valleys of Central Asia, both cut off for generations from the drift of human change and advance, and now bounding ahead at a tremendous pace. He said all this without visiting these areas. I agree with Sita Ram Goel when he says that it is a safe bet that such a visit would have hardly helped him to descend from his trance. Nehru would not have noticed the slave labour camps with which Siberia stood dotted or he would have found some high sounding explanation for them also, as he did for so many other Soviet crimes.

        Stern, savage, semi-oriental, Stalin was, according to many of his contemporaries 'Genghis Khan with a telephone'. If Stalin had not died in 1954, I have no doubt Nehru would have conferred on him the highest distinction of Bharath Ratna for having been a great champion of humanism and peace in the line of Gautama Buddha and Mahavira.