3 - Break with the Old World

Summary

The third chapter, ‘Break with the Old World’ uses memoirs, intelligence accounts, and hitherto unused sources from the Comintern archives, to follow the journeys of Indian revolutionaries to and through Moscow. For revolutionaries from the colonized world, Moscow offered support, sustenance, and a vision for a liberated future. It was also a site of wonder and amazement, where a new world and a new human was being inaugurated. For those who learnt their communism in the Soviet Union, Moscow was both a physical embodiment of a break with History and a vision of a utopic world within reach. Through the lifeworlds (Lebenswelt) of ‘Moscow graduates’, I trace the history of the varied and multilayered engagements between the Communist International (Comintern) and communist groups in India from the heady and millenarian days of the Leninist moment to its calamitous Stalinist successor.