A typical "Indian Intellectual" who confuses book learning for reality

The East was Red

Growing up in northern India in the early 1980s, Pankaj Mishra longed
to escape to a wider world. Soviet books and magazines, sold in
subsidised mobile bookshops, offered tantalising glimpses of an ideal
society and he planned to emigrate to the USSR. Later, after the fall
of the Berlin wall, he began to learn the truth about his utopia

Saturday February 4, 2006
The Guardian

In 1980, shortly before my 11th birthday, I wrote my first essay in
English. The subject was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan - or the
Soviet "intervention", as I termed it, in a "fraternal communist
country threatened by imperialism". I had followed events in
Afghanistan anxiously if somewhat fitfully; we had no television, and
the newspapers, arriving in Jhansi, our small Indian town, from Delhi a
day late, reported American threats to boycott the Moscow Olympics but
said little about what was going on inside Afghanistan. Nevertheless, I
boldly predicted that the Soviets would modernise a backward and feudal
country, revolutionise its relations of production, and set it on the
path of prosperity and peace, inflicting, in the process, another
crushing defeat on the forces of reaction and imperialism.




In December 2004, I travelled on the road from Uzbekistan across the
Oxus River on which the first Soviet convoys had rolled into
Afghanistan 25 years before. Fearful of ambushes, the Soviets had mined
the surrounding desert right up to the verges; and venturing out of the
car for a pee I walked into a minefield - one of the many across
Afghanistan that had killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of people
- and then had to learn, for some long minutes, how hard it is
literally to retrace one's steps.
What goes around comes around, even if the intense fear of losing one's
life, or a limb or two, seems a very severe karmic punishment for some
youthful cliché-mongering. Later that evening, drinking alone and hard
in my gloomy hotel room in Mazar-i-Sharif, for the first time in many
years I remembered my essay, and I couldn't help but wonder: what the
hell had I been thinking? Perhaps I was no more deluded than people in
Europe and America who thought that the Soviets wanted to conquer the
world and who had made elaborate plans to fight, and survive, a nuclear
war. At least I'd had the excuse of being 10 years old. But it was
still odd to remember how during my childhood and adolescence I was an
admirer and supporter - unpaid and thus very sincere - of the Soviet
Union. For much of this time, I wasn't quite sure what such words as
socialism, capitalism, reaction, and imperialism really meant; but I
was ready to believe in the superiority of socialism over capitalism
simply because this was the official ideology of the Soviet Union. A
framed photograph of Lenin stood on my desk, and I possessed, if I did
not actually work my way through, the complete works of Plekhanov. And
self-consciously I'd prepared myself for adult life in the Soviet
Union.

This was by no means a merely natural consequence of my straitened
lower-middle-class circumstances. Genteel poverty of the kind we knew
had drawn most people in my Brahmin family closer to the Hindu
nationalists and to a politics of resentment. My father denounced as
hypocrites and frauds the communists he encountered in his work as a
trade unionist in Indian Railways, and he took a sceptical view of my
Soviet-ophilia. But he had grown up in another time. For boys like me,
in north Indian railway towns in the 70s and 80s, where nothing much
happened apart from the arrival and departure of trains from big
cities, the Soviet Union alone appeared to promise an escape from our
limited, dusty world.

It is hard now, in these days of visual excess, to recall the sensuous
poverty of the towns I lived in: the white light falling all day from
the sky upon a flat land only slightly relieved by bare rock and the
occasional tree, and houses of mud or grimy brick, among which any
trace of colour - shop signs, painted government posters for family
planning, or garish posters for Bollywood films - could provoke a sense
of wonder. It explains the eagerness with which I awaited Soviet Life,
the first magazine I subscribed to, which was really an illustrated
press release boasting of Soviet achievements in science, agriculture,
industrial production, sports, and literature.

When a new issue slipped through the mail slot, I would smell its
glossy pages and run my fingers across them. Alone in my room, I gazed
for a long time at colour pictures of young Soviet women raising
production levels on the Ukrainian steppe, in the Fergana valley and
Siberian oilfields. I lingered longest over the pages with pictures of
Young Pioneers, and then cut them out carefully and wrapped them around
my school notebooks, obscuring the calendar-art images of the young
Lord Krishna. I did not outgrow Soviet Life even after I got my parents
to subscribe to Soviet Literature, and cajoled my younger sister, who
had won a small school scholarship, into giving me a subscription to
the news magazine New Times. The magazines cost less than the stamps on
the brown envelopes in which they arrived - indeed, my parents declined
to support my pen pal-ship with a Young Pioneer girl because airmail
letters were too expensive.

The Soviet Union had helped set up and then subsidise publishing houses
and bookshops across much of what was then known as the developing
world. America seems to have barely participated in this subtle
campaign of the cold war that the Soviet Union, with its books,
magazines and films, waged in the remotest Indian towns. The Soviets
had made India a major beneficiary of their cultural philanthropy
because it had strong communist parties that ruled states in the south
and the west, was constitutionally committed to a form of socialism,
and was also a leader of the third world non-aligned movement, which
tilted towards the Soviets. Houses of Soviet Culture existed in all the
big and some small cities, competing strongly with the cultural
outposts of the so-called free world, the British Council, the United
States Information Service-run American Center, and the German Max
Mueller Bhavan. Mobile bookshops toured the towns offering
subscriptions to Soviet magazines and organising book fairs where you
could buy two hardback editions of Russian classics for five rupees (at
a time when one dollar equalled 18 rupees).

The mobile bookshops came to our town without warning, often appearing
in a field where gypsies from Rajasthan set up their black tents.
Inside the long truck, books stood in open dusty shelves, monitored by
thin young men in glasses. There were many Soviet translations of
Russian classics, in addition to the works of Marx, Lenin and
Plekhanov. I recall seeing nothing by either Stalin or Khrushchev,
although the speeches of Brezhnev and Suslov were always available. My
earliest purchases were collections of Russian fairy tales, and I now
wish I still had, or could recall the titles of, the beautifully
illustrated volumes that enlivened much of my childhood.

Though dedicated to advancing the cause of socialism, the Soviet-made
books afforded best of all the satisfaction of private ownership. I
tended to buy more books than I could read, such as that set of
Plekhanov. I moved quickly through Tolstoy 's Childhood , Adolescence,
Youth and then stumbled badly in Crime and Punishment, whose Christian
themes did not become comprehensible to me until my 20s. But the Soviet
books came at the right time, when I was ready to move on from my
childhood lingering in the Mahabharata and Ramayana, and was reading
more and more in English, which, unknown to me, was becoming the
language of global capitalism.

Some of the Russian classics carried introductions from such approved
critics as Belinsky and Chernyshevsky, whom some years later I was
mortified to see ridiculed at length in Nabokov's novel The Gift

I can see now that cultural commissars dictated the offerings of Raduga
and Progress Publishers, the two imprints that published most of the
translations I saw in the Soviet-subsidised bookshops. There was no
Nabokov - and I am surprised to see among the few books that remain
with me a volume of stories by Bunin. Gorky and Mayakovsky were much
preferred, and Soviet pride in the Nobel Laureate Sholokhov was
expressed through multiple editions of Quiet Flows the Don

Much of Pushkin, Lermontov, and Leskov could be published without much
difficulty. But several of Dostoevsky 's novels would have posed
problems, and Gogol's rants and Tolstoy's Christian writings must not
have appeared to the commissars as the best examples of the Soviet
Union's revolutionary literary heritage. Herzen's novel Who Is to
Blame? was present everywhere, but his memoir and letters were nowhere
to be seen. As for post-1917 literature, you couldn't have known,
reading the products of Raduga and Progress Publishers, who Bulgakov or
Mandelstam were; I read them, along with Akhmatova and Pasternak, only
in my early 20s, in British and American editions. A book titled How
the Steel Was Tempered was very conspicuous. There were novels by a
writer called Aleksey Tolstoy. Was he related to Leo? I couldn't know.

Though sturdily bound and on thick paper, the books provided little
biographical information and did not even name the translators.
However, they often included pictures from the lives of the more famous
writers. I had read First Love and Spring Torrents, and already
fantasised about pursuing romance and intellectual conversation in
arbours in overgrown gardens, when one day I saw a photograph of
Turgenev walking down a long straight path though tall birch trees. The
picture, suggesting days spent in work and reflection, captivated me
for a long time and gave urgency to my desire to emigrate to the Soviet
Union. On hellishly hot days, I imagined myself walking along snowbound
Nevsky Prospekt in an overcoat. On other days, I saw myself studying to
become an engineer in Leningrad and then settling down with one of the
pretty Young Pioneers in Turkmen costume and helping to boost
production levels in a little corner of that vast land. As I grew
older, this fantasy even seemed possible to realise. Many students
wishing to put Indian deprivations behind them chose the Soviet Union
and its engineering and medical scholarships over the much harder route
- via GRE and Gmat tests - to America.

It's strange to recall that America animated none of my youthful
daydreams. I did not see a Hollywood film until my late teens. The only
non- Indian pop stars I knew were European - the Beatles, Abba, and
Cliff Richard - and I have yet to see a copy of Quest, the
Encounter-style intellectual magazine that the CIA funded in Bombay. I
did long to own old copies of Time and Life that I saw being sold on
the pavements of the big cities. But they were too pricey, and so was
the magazine Span, the closest the Americans came to producing their
own version of Soviet Life. American books were out of the question.
Once, an uncle of mine who had emigrated to the United States in the
mid-1960s and had since lived, improbably, in Montana, sent me some
comic books, and for a brief season I was intrigued by Archie,
Veronica, Betty, Richie Rich, Casper the Friendly Ghost, and Dennis the
Menace.

In any case, America was not only beyond my means. It was also an
imperialist bully, the malicious antagonist of socialist and
non-aligned countries - and it wasn't just the New Times that told me
so. Anti-Americanism flourished among Indian politicians and
journalists, who never tired of mentioning how Nixon and Kissinger had
not only supported Pakistan in its war with India over Bangladesh but
had also tried to intimidate India by ordering the 7th Fleet into the
Indian Ocean; and how the Soviet Union had proved to be India's most
valuable friend by vetoing the anti-Indian resolution moved by the US
at the UN Security Council. I had no trouble believing Indira Gandhi
when she claimed that the CIA was working hard to undermine our country
because of its principled non-aligned stance. At the same time, it was
impossible to take Americans seriously. I remember being shocked by a
picture of Jimmy Carter in the White House with his feet on his desk.
And later I was equally shocked to know that Americans had elected a
film actor as their president. Could such men be trusted? In contrast,
the pictures of Soviet leaders radiated benign power and knowledge. I
examined these as closely as a Kremlinologist, but for signs and
portents of my own future. Those brows of Brezhnev; the melancholy of
Gromyko; the steely seriousness of Suslov - how eloquently they spoke
of a selfless dedication to social and economic justice! Of a feeling
for those of us in the poor, invisible places of the world! It was
easy, if you knew nothing else, to draw a larger sense of belonging,
even a personal sense of security, from the pictures of Brezhnev
hugging Indira Gandhi, and Soviet leaders exchanging toasts with
Honecker and Husak and Castro.

In 1982 I was in Bombay with my parents, who were arranging the
marriage of my eldest sister, when I heard of Brezhnev's death. I went
immediately to the House of Soviet Culture, where a condolence book lay
open underneath a framed poster of the departed leader. I asked for a
copy of the poster at the reception. They didn't have one. My elder
cousin in Bombay, who visited the American Center more frequently than
the House of Soviet Culture, and would later work for Coca-Cola, joked
that they were waiting to see if the new Soviet leaders would declare
Brezhnev a good or a bad guy.

My mood was grim. What would happen to the Soviet Union? And to the
developing and underdeveloped countries it had supported? I began
looking especially closely at pictures of Andropov and Chernenko,
hoping to figure out their world view. The following year, when New
Delhi hosted the summit meeting of the non-aligned movement against a
backdrop of growing unrest in Poland, and photos appeared in all the
newspapers of handsome Castro bear-hugging Mrs Gandhi, I felt somewhat
relieved. Here was proof that the small, besieged socialist nations of
the world could stick together.

But time was running out for both the Soviet Union and my
Soviet-ophilia. I proved to be an indifferent student of science and
mathematics at high school, in no position to travel to Russia as a
student of engineering or medicine. At my provincial undergraduate
university, I drifted into a communist student outfit which held Marx
study groups, organised demonstrations, and also stood candidates for
elections to the student union. Here I met students from similar
backgrounds, who possessed the same translations I had read and could
recite Mayakovsky's poems and certain passages in Gorky's revolutionary
novel, Mother, from memory. But my heart was not in student activism: I
was a reader, therefore a daydreamer. I knew that I wanted to be a
writer, and the desire led me, in Delhi in the late 80s, to spend more
time at the British Council and American Center than at the House of
Soviet Culture. (Daydreams may turn out to be the most practical things
of all.) Arduously acquired Pelicans and Penguins started to jostle
with the cheap hardbacks of Raduga and Progress Publishers on my
bookshelves, and I began to imagine my name on such a glossy spine.

I also remember reading Edmund Wilson's self-critical introduction to
the 1971 edition of To the Finland Station and beginning to think of
Lenin in another way. Soon afterward, I lost the framed photograph of
Lenin in one of my many moves, and left the collected Plekhanov
standing in a room I vacated at university. But I still followed Soviet
affairs through New Times. The communist activists I knew at university
claimed that a reformer like Gorbachev was proof of the self-renewing
potential of the Soviet system, but I didn't know what to make of him.

He made me uneasy with his frank confessions of Soviet stagnation and
decline, and I was bewildered by his frequent public appearances with
Reagan. Things, I feared, would end badly. And, by confirming my
premonitions, the collapse of the Berlin wall left me cold.

I had left my university in Delhi and was living in a village in the
Himalayas when the Soviet Union imploded. By then its landmarks in
India had already faded. Perestroika and glasnost had brought down the
shutters on Soviet-subsidised culture in India. And India itself seemed
to be turning away from its socialist and non-aligned friends. After
years of protectionism and virtuous austerity, it had started to
globalise its economy and to embrace unselfconsciously the culture of
consumption.

By the late 80s, television had arrived in Indian small towns and, with
its images of the wealthier cultures of the west, begun to diversify
our fantasies. A shop selling greeting cards replaced a communist
bookshop. One day in a pavement bazaar of Old Delhi, I saw the
collected works of Plekhanov being sold as scrap paper. I stopped,
briefly tempted to re-acquire them. And then I moved on down the
street.

Soviet Life ceased publication in 1991. My subscription to New Times
had ended by then, and I had not opened the renewal notices.

So many years had passed since I wrote my essay endorsing the Soviet
invasion of Afghanistan. Moving away from thoughts of escape, I became
interested, for the first time, in my own world. India gave me the
subjects that, trying to write, I had often despaired of finding. In
the meantime, I also learned a bit more, if reluctantly, about the
former Soviet Union's cruelties and absurdities - the knowledge
carefully concealed from me by New Times .

As the 90s wore on, Russia's quick descent into gangster capitalism and
colonialist brutality in Chechnya further muddied and finally dissolved
the image that I had cherished for much of my life. In the late 1990s I
began to travel in Asia, Europe and America. But I resisted visiting
Russia. There remained enough of the apparatchik-lover inside me to
mourn the break-up of the Soviet Union and to conceive a strong dislike
for Boris Yeltsin - never did he appear a greater boor and bully to me
than during what western journalists called his finest moment, the
failed coup attempt in 1991, when he sat with a megaphone atop a tank
in front of the Russian parliament. Reading Tatyana Tolstoya's
denunciation of him in the New York Review of Books gave me profound
satisfaction. It was with something close to glee that I read Stephen F
Cohen's book about the deluded western attempt to export free-market
democracy to Russia, and I am still not above a certain perverse
pleasure when the Economist wonders, confusion breaking through its
silkily arrogant tone, what the west ought to do with the increasingly
unpredictable Putin.

Occasionally I meet someone with similar memories of underdevelopment.
In Lahore, Pakistan, some years ago, I walked into a living-room - and
into my childhood: the bookshelves showed the same Soviet spines my
eyes had rested on for years. In London, an old Egyptian cabdriver
recalled using Soviet Life as wallpaper in his home in Cairo, and
reminisced about the days of Nasser and Arab socialism.

More recently, I met the Cuban writer José Manuel Prieto and his
Russian wife at a convivial dinner party in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. It
turned out that Prieto had done what I had only fantasised about: he
travelled from Cuba to the Soviet Union as a student, and there, in a
small town in Siberia, he fell in love with a beautiful Russian woman
and married her, and helped boost, briefly, the Soviet Union's
production levels in literature if not oil and gas. He knew of Raduga
and Progress Publishers, for he had worked as a translator of Soviet
literature. Not only that, but at the same time that I sought escape
from the north Indian plains by reading Turgenev, he and his wife
relieved their Siberian solitude through Bollywood films - among the
few foreign films allowed into the Soviet Union.

A different kind of internationalism, called globalisation, had now
brought us to the country that had been the nemesis of socialism,
indeed of much of what we once knew and believed in. The English
language that the Soviets helped teach me had made possible my life and
writing career in a world very different from their own. Our futures
were now bound to America, although I couldn't bear to look too closely
or long at pictures of George W Bush. Were Prieto and I content? Had we
finally arrived at happiness? It is always hard to tell, and history
may spring yet more of its ironies on us. But when we got drunk, and
raised a toast to socialism and non-alignment, I couldn't suppress a
pang of affection for our vanished past, for the austere worlds in
which we had to find our small joys, and in which the solidarities that
now seem merely rhetorical had given us consolation and hope.

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