06-19-2006, 03:10 PM
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THE RUSSIAN CONNECTION
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By Dr Purabi Roy
(Reproduced with the permission of the daily Pioneer, which carried this piece titled as "Netaji: The enigma endures" on January 22, 2006)
The story of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose's post-August 18, 1945 life - and eventual death - is probably locked up in some archive in Russia or any of the other former republics that made up the Soviet Union. After the disintegration of the USSR, only a handful of the thousands of archives have been thrown open to scholars.
These store the files of the KGB, the Communist Party of Soviet Union (CPSU) and its satellites in the provinces and republics, the Army and other defence establishments and countless think tanks aligned to the Communist party. The Communists, it must be noted, were compulsive recorders and stashed away the proceedings of meetings of any significance - or, as it turned out, insignificance - for later reference. In the post-1991 era, quite a few indications have emerged from the writings of Russian archivists and historians pointing to a definite link between the CPSU's pre-World War II interest in Netaji and the big enigma surrounding his disappearance.
It is up to Indian scholars working on Russia to get to the bottom of this mystery because the Russians themselves are not likely to plumb the archives in pursuance of a story, which is not central to their own needs. Besides, under the economic conditions prevailing in Russia, scholars find funding for academic research quite hard to come by. What exacerbates the tragedy is that there are few Indians to pursue Indo-Russian history, particularly with a focus on the Soviet era, and the root cause for that, again, is paucity of scholarships and fellowships. Even the few, like me, who are keen to get to the truth, are stonewalled by bureaucratic opposition. All that a scholar needs to access the once-forbidden archives these days is a letter of recommendation from the Ministry of External Affairs. Professor Bondorevski, a noted India expert with good relations with the Kremlin, once urged me to meet a senior MEA official called Mr Shukla. He said that Mr Shukla was his friend and would cooperate. But subsequently, the official told me in quite a candid way that the Government of India was not keen.
A good question often making the rounds these days is: What did the Justice MK Mukherjee Commission of Inquiry find in Russia during its fortnight-long sojourn in September 2005? While hesitating to speculate on the contents of his report, I can only say that a judicial inquiry is hardly the appropriate vehicle for navigating through the veritable ocean of facts, often camouflaged with suggestive passages whose implications are spiked with intrigue. One hint carried in a solitary manuscript found in one corner of Russia may require follow-up from a Japanese end, or the trail could possibly resurface in Romania. Another aspect to think of is the enduring Russian tradition of secrecy. Even Justice Mukherjee discovered that to his chagrin.
Now that we are sure that there was no air crash at Taihoku airport in Formosa (Taiwan) - and, therefore, no definitive evidence that Netaji died on August 18, 1945 - all indicators point to a Russian role behind his vanishing from the scene. Half a century has passed since, marked by the collapse of Communism in Russia, but a closure to the mystery eludes us.
We have to ponder first on what could possibly have been the reason behind Joseph Stalin's allergy towards Jawaharlal Nehru. He did not give audience to Nehru's sister, Vijayalakshmi Pandit, the first Ambassador of India to Moscow. Besides, he refused to invite the Prime Minister to his country, despite a lot of back-channel requests. In 1951, Stalin told a visiting Indian Communist delegation comprising, among others, Aruna Asaf Ali, through the two interlocutors in the India Section of the CPSU that "Indian Communists should distance themselves from Nehru".
It was only under Glasnost that we witnessed a shift in interest, principally on the part of Soviet scholars, to this subject. In 1989, E Devyatkina, an India expert, wrote a book, Social and Political Thought of Subhas Chandra Bose. This can be counted as the first post-Stalinist inquiry into Netaji's life. On his death, however, there is precious little. But Devyatkina, who had access to a lot of records in what was still a close society, wrote: "There is reason to doubt the theory that he died in 1945."
A year later, another book by India expert, AV Raikov, Subhas Chandra Bose and Soviet Russia, had an interesting foreword by Leonid Mitrokhin (not Vassily Mitrokhin). He wrote: "Glasnost has erased much of the USSR's shame and helped restructure her relations with other countries. Scholars of the USSR are trying to take a relook at Subhas Chandra Bose." The same Leonid Mitrokhin had once tried to dissuade me from investigating the truth. He had said the "truth would hurt Indo-Russian relations". Why did such an avowed crusader for the truth take this curious stand. Unfortunately, Mitrokhin died with his secret in 2002.
In 1992, a year after the fall of USSR, a Russian journalist, Vinogradov, came out with a magazine article, "Life and Death of Netaji Bose", which ended on an ambiguous note. Curiously, an editorial comment at the end of the note reiterated the fact that there continues to be a "diplomatic silence between the two countries". Another journalist, Kuznets, a veteran from the Afghan war, endorsed the mystery, too. Once again, the familiar equivocal ending, leading to the same estimation - the secret is buried very deep indeed.
The biggest breakthrough came in 1993 when Asia and Africa Today, a publication of the Oriental Institute, Moscow, announced that it would, in a subsequent edition, publish some material from the archives of the dissolved KGB. That must have unnerved the Narasimha Rao Government because its Ambassador in Moscow, Ranen Sen, tried to use diplomatic pressure on the Institute to prevent it from coming out with the article. A Counsellor from the Embassy, Ajay Malhotra, went to meet the joint-editor of the publication, V Turadzev. Though the Indian diplomatic move to muzzle the publication did not yield results, Turadzev later told me that that there was pressure on him to desist from such boldness in future. Still, Nos. 8, 9 and 10, of Asia and Africa Today, though uncharitable in terms of shedding significant new light on Netaji's disappearance, do end up giving solid leads that the KGB's archives may yet have the truth within.
My investigations, however limited owing to my status as a foreigner in Russia, have led me to the doors of the State Archives of the Russian Federation and numerous other storehouses of information. I am told by many Russian friends that they have stumbled upon information, which could be of help to me. But since Subhas Chandra Bose was not the focus of their own inquiry, these nuggets were not useful to them. A close friend, Tatiana Zagorodnikova, had, through a former Warsaw Pact Major General, Alexander Kulesnikov, come to know that the latter had chanced upon evidence that Netaji was present in the USSR in 1946. She even got him to hand over a file containing some documents to the late Forward Bloc MP, Chitta Basu, when he went to Moscow as part of an Indian parliamentary delegation. Kulesnikov went on to write an article in Patriot magazine that he had seen a file that referred to a meeting between Stalin, Molotov and Vichensky, in which the subject of "Chandra Bose" was discussed.
Unfortunately, when Kulesnikov was summoned before the Mukherjee Commission, he ducked. The Russian Government curtly told New Delhi that Kulesnikov was "untraceable" even though it is well known that he is now a diplomat posted in Turkey.
What are the Russians trying to hide?
(The writer, formerly with the International Relations Department of Jadavpore University, Kolkata, is a noted expert on Indo-Russian relations
THE RUSSIAN CONNECTION
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Dr Purabi Roy
(Reproduced with the permission of the daily Pioneer, which carried this piece titled as "Netaji: The enigma endures" on January 22, 2006)
The story of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose's post-August 18, 1945 life - and eventual death - is probably locked up in some archive in Russia or any of the other former republics that made up the Soviet Union. After the disintegration of the USSR, only a handful of the thousands of archives have been thrown open to scholars.
These store the files of the KGB, the Communist Party of Soviet Union (CPSU) and its satellites in the provinces and republics, the Army and other defence establishments and countless think tanks aligned to the Communist party. The Communists, it must be noted, were compulsive recorders and stashed away the proceedings of meetings of any significance - or, as it turned out, insignificance - for later reference. In the post-1991 era, quite a few indications have emerged from the writings of Russian archivists and historians pointing to a definite link between the CPSU's pre-World War II interest in Netaji and the big enigma surrounding his disappearance.
It is up to Indian scholars working on Russia to get to the bottom of this mystery because the Russians themselves are not likely to plumb the archives in pursuance of a story, which is not central to their own needs. Besides, under the economic conditions prevailing in Russia, scholars find funding for academic research quite hard to come by. What exacerbates the tragedy is that there are few Indians to pursue Indo-Russian history, particularly with a focus on the Soviet era, and the root cause for that, again, is paucity of scholarships and fellowships. Even the few, like me, who are keen to get to the truth, are stonewalled by bureaucratic opposition. All that a scholar needs to access the once-forbidden archives these days is a letter of recommendation from the Ministry of External Affairs. Professor Bondorevski, a noted India expert with good relations with the Kremlin, once urged me to meet a senior MEA official called Mr Shukla. He said that Mr Shukla was his friend and would cooperate. But subsequently, the official told me in quite a candid way that the Government of India was not keen.
A good question often making the rounds these days is: What did the Justice MK Mukherjee Commission of Inquiry find in Russia during its fortnight-long sojourn in September 2005? While hesitating to speculate on the contents of his report, I can only say that a judicial inquiry is hardly the appropriate vehicle for navigating through the veritable ocean of facts, often camouflaged with suggestive passages whose implications are spiked with intrigue. One hint carried in a solitary manuscript found in one corner of Russia may require follow-up from a Japanese end, or the trail could possibly resurface in Romania. Another aspect to think of is the enduring Russian tradition of secrecy. Even Justice Mukherjee discovered that to his chagrin.
Now that we are sure that there was no air crash at Taihoku airport in Formosa (Taiwan) - and, therefore, no definitive evidence that Netaji died on August 18, 1945 - all indicators point to a Russian role behind his vanishing from the scene. Half a century has passed since, marked by the collapse of Communism in Russia, but a closure to the mystery eludes us.
We have to ponder first on what could possibly have been the reason behind Joseph Stalin's allergy towards Jawaharlal Nehru. He did not give audience to Nehru's sister, Vijayalakshmi Pandit, the first Ambassador of India to Moscow. Besides, he refused to invite the Prime Minister to his country, despite a lot of back-channel requests. In 1951, Stalin told a visiting Indian Communist delegation comprising, among others, Aruna Asaf Ali, through the two interlocutors in the India Section of the CPSU that "Indian Communists should distance themselves from Nehru".
It was only under Glasnost that we witnessed a shift in interest, principally on the part of Soviet scholars, to this subject. In 1989, E Devyatkina, an India expert, wrote a book, Social and Political Thought of Subhas Chandra Bose. This can be counted as the first post-Stalinist inquiry into Netaji's life. On his death, however, there is precious little. But Devyatkina, who had access to a lot of records in what was still a close society, wrote: "There is reason to doubt the theory that he died in 1945."
A year later, another book by India expert, AV Raikov, Subhas Chandra Bose and Soviet Russia, had an interesting foreword by Leonid Mitrokhin (not Vassily Mitrokhin). He wrote: "Glasnost has erased much of the USSR's shame and helped restructure her relations with other countries. Scholars of the USSR are trying to take a relook at Subhas Chandra Bose." The same Leonid Mitrokhin had once tried to dissuade me from investigating the truth. He had said the "truth would hurt Indo-Russian relations". Why did such an avowed crusader for the truth take this curious stand. Unfortunately, Mitrokhin died with his secret in 2002.
In 1992, a year after the fall of USSR, a Russian journalist, Vinogradov, came out with a magazine article, "Life and Death of Netaji Bose", which ended on an ambiguous note. Curiously, an editorial comment at the end of the note reiterated the fact that there continues to be a "diplomatic silence between the two countries". Another journalist, Kuznets, a veteran from the Afghan war, endorsed the mystery, too. Once again, the familiar equivocal ending, leading to the same estimation - the secret is buried very deep indeed.
The biggest breakthrough came in 1993 when Asia and Africa Today, a publication of the Oriental Institute, Moscow, announced that it would, in a subsequent edition, publish some material from the archives of the dissolved KGB. That must have unnerved the Narasimha Rao Government because its Ambassador in Moscow, Ranen Sen, tried to use diplomatic pressure on the Institute to prevent it from coming out with the article. A Counsellor from the Embassy, Ajay Malhotra, went to meet the joint-editor of the publication, V Turadzev. Though the Indian diplomatic move to muzzle the publication did not yield results, Turadzev later told me that that there was pressure on him to desist from such boldness in future. Still, Nos. 8, 9 and 10, of Asia and Africa Today, though uncharitable in terms of shedding significant new light on Netaji's disappearance, do end up giving solid leads that the KGB's archives may yet have the truth within.
My investigations, however limited owing to my status as a foreigner in Russia, have led me to the doors of the State Archives of the Russian Federation and numerous other storehouses of information. I am told by many Russian friends that they have stumbled upon information, which could be of help to me. But since Subhas Chandra Bose was not the focus of their own inquiry, these nuggets were not useful to them. A close friend, Tatiana Zagorodnikova, had, through a former Warsaw Pact Major General, Alexander Kulesnikov, come to know that the latter had chanced upon evidence that Netaji was present in the USSR in 1946. She even got him to hand over a file containing some documents to the late Forward Bloc MP, Chitta Basu, when he went to Moscow as part of an Indian parliamentary delegation. Kulesnikov went on to write an article in Patriot magazine that he had seen a file that referred to a meeting between Stalin, Molotov and Vichensky, in which the subject of "Chandra Bose" was discussed.
Unfortunately, when Kulesnikov was summoned before the Mukherjee Commission, he ducked. The Russian Government curtly told New Delhi that Kulesnikov was "untraceable" even though it is well known that he is now a diplomat posted in Turkey.
What are the Russians trying to hide?
(The writer, formerly with the International Relations Department of Jadavpore University, Kolkata, is a noted expert on Indo-Russian relations