In 1955, nearly three decades after his first journey, Jawaharlal Nehru returned to the Soviet Union as the prime minister of a young nation striving to industrialise amid widespread poverty. More than the grand welcome he received, it was the USSR’s planning ethos and rapid transformation that intrigued him, especially when measured against India’s own structural constraints. Yet he remained clear that any lesson India borrowed must avoid communist coercion and preserve individual freedoms
As his airplane cruised over the Arabian Sea, a weary Jawaharlal Nehru caught up with his fortnightly ritual of writing a letter to the Chief Ministers of Indian states. Dated 5 June 1955, he informed them of his expectations from his imminent visit to the Soviet Union.
Nehru had first travelled to the country three decades earlier, in 1927, on the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Russia, he wrote then, was “too much of a live wire to be touched without a violent reaction”: it could only be written about in superlatives, of either “praise or denunciation”. He had prepped by reading up copiously on the revolution and its aftermath and armed himself with the foreknowledge that whatever he sees will be, to some measure, a manicured, tailored-for-propaganda reality. He was too much of a Gandhian to embrace a political system that celebrated brute violence as a permanent necessity. But there remained a pull of the Soviet economic philosophy. When he later filed his reports for The Hindu and Young India, he couldn’t help but be tremendously impressed by the social and economic transformation he observed. One of the key lessons he drew from his 1927 trip was the centrality of planning to rapid progress.