Author: M.K. Tikku
Publication: The Hindustan Times
Date: April 26, 2001
In December 1951, the Communist
Party of India (CPI) received a cash handout of $1,00,000 from Moscow.
That was just the beginning. The cash packets, which tended to vary in
size from year to year, appear to have continued well into the seventies.
This is indicated in Soviet archival
documents, copies of which are available with the Hoover Institution at
Stanford University here.
According to these documents, the
money came out of a trust set up by Joseph Stalin in 1950 to finance Communist
parties round the world. Two years later, Stalin for some inexplicable
reason turned over the trust to the Romanian Council of Trade Unions. But
this was no more than a nominal transfer, as all decisions concerning the
allocation of funds and their transfer continued to be taken in and by
Moscow.
Bangaru Laxman, it would appear,
was not the only one with a preference for dollars. The use of dollars,
as the preferred currency in these transactions even while the Soviet Union
had later put a vigorous rouble-rupee trade regime in place, appears to
have been intended to ensure secrecy.
It is thus that the minutes of a
meeting deliberating on allocations on the eve of the twentieth congress
in 1956 specifically mentions the need "to maintain secrecy in transferring
grants".
Consequently, the Indian Communist
party received $1,50,000 in 1953; $1,00,000 in 1955 and $50,000 for the
following year; $25,000 in 1958; besides $1,05,000 in 1959. The tally goes
further: $2,23,000 in 1961; $1,11,000 in 1962; $ 3,00,000 in1963; $2,50,000
in 1965; $3,60,000 in 1966; $2,25,000 in 1969 and $2,80,000 in 1973.
The gaps, according to Leonara Soroka,
the Russian-born archivist at the Hoover Institution, are explained by
the fact that the Hoover does not have the complete set of the records.
"What we have got is what the Russian
prosecutors chose to pick up for use in the constitutional trial brought
up by President Yeltsin in 1992 against his Communist adversaries. What
we know, however, is that the funding continued right through the Gorbachev
years. Some of the East Bloc members, though, had dissociated themselves
from it a couple of years earlier." Such references, however, are not to
be found after the twentieth congress.
