30 Years Since Collapse Of Soviet Union: What Was The Contemporary Hindutva View Of This Historic Event?

The year was 1988 — seven decades and a year after 1917 — the year the Soviet Union dawned as a new hope on humanity.

Starting March that year, the Deendayal Research Institute (DRI), an institution belonging to Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), brought out three issues dedicated to ‘October Revolution and its impact on World Civilization.’ It was also the report of the proceedings of a two-day seminar DRI had conducted on the same topic, in February that year.

The seminar was happening amidst a churning that had started in the erstwhile Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), which would soon become a mighty storm, uprooting and disintegrating the Soviet Union.

The DRI had assembled the best of Indian Marxist minds of the time, diplomats who had worked in the USSR and thought leaders of the Hindutva organisations to the panel. The discussions are to this day an intellectual feast. They are a veritable milestone in the history of honest debate of political philosophy and international affairs, particularly regarding the Soviet Union.

Even before the fall of the USSR, many genuine admirers of Marxism were greatly disturbed by the atrocities of the Marxist state under Stalin. J B S Haldane, who championed Marxism in the circles of biologists and philosophers, moved over to India and became more sympathetic to the Hindu worldview. Gordon Childe, whose contribution to anthropology to this day provides an axiomatic Marxist bias to the discipline, committed suicide. Physicist David Bohm underwent a psychological breakdown.

The Hindutva movement in India has been studying the Marxist state and also ‘the theory’ quite closely and at times even sympathetically.

The DRI seminar shows the interest the Hindutva movement had on Soviet Union.

At that time, Sailendra Nath Ghosh, one of the pioneering ecological thinkers of India, was with the DRI as research director. He was also an ex-Marxist. He made a detailed analysis of the systemic problems of the Marxist-Leninist state.

His essay "October Revolution's Lost Horizon: Roles of Marx's Ambiguities, Lenin's Errors, and Stalin's Distortions" should be made a must read for every student of Hindu thought. In this in-depth essay, Ghosh goes into the fundamental fallacies as well as humanist intentions of Marx and how they lead to the errors of Lenin and then the inhuman brutality of Stalin.

He points out that Marx's basic concern was humanism — "to see self-creative, self-directing man," who "makes his life activity an object of his will and consciousness".

So what held back the Soviet Union from realising the vision of this man? Ghosh wrote:

Then as fourth and fifth points he added the contributions of Lenin and Stalin. In the case of Stalin, the usual Marxist apologist’s line is that the inhumanity of Stalin was his personal failing and paranoia. Marxism could not be made responsible for the personal perversion and power lust of Stalin. But Ghosh points out that the problem was deeper:

Ghosh points out that Stalin’s cruelty on the farmers could be traced ideologically to Marx himself:

The beauty of the paper by Ghosh is that it points out how Marx and Engels also strove for a vision of a complete human renaissance but could not present it correctly. He quotes a letter written by Engels after the death of Marx, answering the criticism that they placed economic factor as the primary determinant:

It was this fundamental deficiency of Marxism which actually got amplified as its singular perspective and unique explaining power. That this fundamental deficiency of Marxism is removed in the Integral Humanism of Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya is obvious.

Further, the Marxist concept of base and superstructure makes Marxists desist from accepting new ideas. This is a keen observation on Marxist psychology:

The importance of this paper cannot be over-emphasised. The hallmark of Hindu thinking, not to fall into binaries, exists throughout the paper like a non-interfering background drone. Ghosh gives a hint of an important possibility in the context of Marx’s observation about the agrarian Hindu communities:

In third issue dealing with the USSR, Dr Murali Manohar Joshi, a physicist, made the following observation in his long comment:

And then in three years, the Soviet Union ceased to be and India started with liberalisation and globalisation. Abdul Kalam’s PURA in its own way reflects the ‘ecological union of agriculture and manufacture’ while aiming to decrease societal inequalities.

In the aftermath of the collapse of the USSR, Manthan brought twin issues addressing this historical event.

Poet, ex-Marxist and author of ‘Guru Govind Geeta’, P K Nijhawan presented an in-depth paper on the "Soviet Experiment — a dream turned nightmare".

In a detailed analysis spread over 10 pages, he made the following important points:

The Manthan issues dealing with the decline and fall of the USSR do not indulge in gloating over the fall of what might perhaps be the most vicious of their enemies, who constantly labelled them as communalists, fascists, counter-revolutionary and the worse. They did not rejoice over the fall of the 'evil empire'.

The perception of Hindutva movement was quite different from the way the Western right-wing viewed the fall.

For the 'Hindutvaites' of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Soviet Union was a great idealistic dream of the Western civilisation, which got experimented on a Eurasian people and turned into a nightmare of continuous human misery and tragedy.

Another experimental lab was China — completely an Asiatic civilisation. The Marxist state collapsed in Soviet Union despite its impressive technological successes. In China, the Mao-Marxist state through famines and Han dominance, had learnt Machiavellian lessons from the collapse of its northern neighbour. It did path-correction with respect to retaining and safeguarding power.

The Hindu observation and narrative of the fall of the Soviet Union is deeper and looks at the core of the problem — preserving the fundamental worth of human life and realising its full potential in a way that also benefits the humanity — nay, all existence.

It is a tough and a hard path. It requires selfless sacrifice of the best of human minds. It is neither through consumerist hedonism nor through state-controlled power pyramids suppressing human liberty that it can be achieved. It needs Dharma — not in the shallow text-based sense but in its widest and deepest meaning — through the lived reality of Hindu civilisation which is also implicitly there in every human culture in its own way.

This path has to be discovered constantly through self-awareness and sacrifice and relentless pursuit of truth. The collapse of Soviet Union and the ecological crisis of modern Western civilisation make us listen to that voice of old India told through the words of Swami Vivekananda: "The flash of lightning is intensely bright but only for a moment; look out, boys it is dazzling your eyes. Beware".