7 - From Russia with Love: Dissidents and Defectors in Cold War India

Summary

In the 1960s, Indian governments were embroiled in a succession of diplomatic disputes involving defections from East to West. In March 1967, Svetlana Iosigovna Alliluyeva, the only daughter of Joseph Stalin, defected through the US embassy in New Delhi. Further back, in 1962, Vladislaw Stepanovich Tarasov, a Soviet merchant seaman, jumped ship in the eastern Indian port of Calcutta. After a legal wrangle in the Indian courts the Russian sailor left the subcontinent to begin a new life in the West. The Tarasov episode came at a point when India was reeling from a military defeat inflicted by China, and the national government was actively courting American and Soviet assistance to stave off what, at one point, appeared a threat to the India Republic’s survival. More broadly, defections staged in India served as an unwelcome irritant in relations between the Soviet Union, the United States and Great Britain, when these countries were attempting to forge more productive ties in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis. This chapter focuses attention on the role played by Western intelligence services in the story of Cold War defection.