96 REVIEWS AND NOTICES

between the Soviet policy on Kashmir in Stalin’s time and that under Khrushchev. China
and South Africa, Dr. Naik points out, became the early meeting-points between India
and Russia-though one might have a suspicion that it was India’s effort to move China
away from the Soviet Union and closer to Asia and her growing importance in Asian and
world affairs which was responsible for the change in Soviet policy towards India rather
than the support India was giving to China in getting her into the United Nations.
Dr. Naik has kept himself so strictly within the framework of Indo-Soviet relations
that he has not cared to place his study against the wider background of European and
international politics. In the thirties, for example. the Sowet directive to the Communist
Party of India to change its policy from one of ‘unmasking the national reformism of the
Indian National Congress’ to that of ‘co-operation with the Congress with a view to streng-
thening its mass character’ was part of the Soviet policy of supporting united fronts in
Europe against the rising fascist powers. It was not something limited to the Soviet atti-
tude to Indian nationalism. At a later stage, both Pakistan and .China, undoubtedly,
served as important factors in determining the nature of Indo-Soviet relations, but the
wider determinant always was the character of global politics. While the role of Sino-
Soviet relations in shaping the Soviet policy towards India has been brought. out in a
separate chapter, the role of Pakistan entering into closer relations with the United States
has not been discussed with equal thoroughness, and the global, systemic pressures remain
unanalysed. India’s constraints in coming out more openly on the Hungarian issue,
which quick1.y followed the Suez crisis, have been touched briefly. Similarly, the impact
o n the Russian attitude of the military reverses India suffered at the hands of China in
1962 cou!d have been discussed in greater details in the light of Russian sources, which
were available tp the author.
A change in the Soviet policy towards Pakistan had started after 1962, though Dr.
Naik traces it only from April 1965 when President Ayub paid a visit to the Soviet Union.
Dr. Naik is Corrcct in his assessment of the Soviet policy towards India when he says that
(1) the Soviet Union is determined to pursue its policy of establishing good relations with
Pakistan, irresp.ective.of how India reacts to it, since it suits her national interest, and
that (2) the Soviet Union, taking all things into consideration, would regard India’s friend-
ship as more .valuable than Pakistan’s. He is also coirect in pointing out that the Soviet
Union has tried more recently to compensate the loosening of her political bonds with
India (as a result of her Paklstan policy, which she must follow in her own national interest)
by tightening her economic ties with her. India’s rapidly growing economic relations
with the Soviet Union are of greater benefit to India than to the Soviet Union. India
also has to depend on the Soviet Union for military weapons. These are important con-
straints which will come in the way of India trying to break away from the Soviet Union
in near future.
Dr. Naik has adopted the historical method for his study of the Soviet policy to-
wards India. While this has enabled him to go fairly deep into the contemporary source-
material, he has not cared to make use of the more recent techniques evolved by scholars
for the study of the foreign policies. If he had used them, his study would have gained
in depth. Dr. Naik has picked UP major landmarks of the Soviet policy towards India
and then brought in overwhelming, evidence of official documents and journalistic reports
to describe the reactions of each event on the two countries, but he has not tried to find
out how the policy leading to that particular event was evolved, t h r o q h what decision-
making processes it was evolved, and under what perceptions, regarding the character
of the international political System on the one side and the country’s national interest,
on the other, the decisions were made. The relations between two countries depend not
only on their understanding of each other but also o n systemic pressures from outside and
constraints from within. No serious attempt has been made by Dr. Naik to link u p the
Soviet policies toware India to global pohtics or Indian reactions to the role of political
parties and public opimon in Indm
But, even in its presentform, the study has added a great deal to our knowledge
of events relating to Indo-Sowet,r$ations ove? the years, if not to a deeper understanding
of them, and is a welcome addtion to the literature available on the subject.
S.P.VARM.4

LENIN : His image in India Ed. By Devendra Kaushik and Leonid Mitrokhin. Vikas,
Delhi. 1970. xviii, 165p. Rs 20.
F an examination of the past leads to an understanding of the present, there is no
I doubt that a reading of the book under review can help us to appreciate why the
political content of our freedom struggle was SO prom‘nent and the economic content
so blurred and incoherent. This factor has led to a situatmn today that the political life
REVIEWS A N D NOTICES 97

has become damnably corrupt and the economic life without a proper direction.
The Soviet Revolution was like a cetaclysmic explosion which literally sent waves
throughout the world. Yet its impact had been different in different countries. The
impact on India is the subject of this book. The authors have done their home work well
and the publisher his job, too, in a good production.
The authors have examined the impact of Lenin and the Soviet Revolution on India
during the first few decades after 1917. Their study shows that while there were only
very few Indian leaders who really understood the philosophy of socialism, there was con-
siderable coverage of the Revolution, particularly of the personality of its architect, Lenin.
But somehow, “Indian socialism” remained frightened of revolution, and in this Nehru.
of course, was the foremost, as evidenced by his own writings and speeches. We failed to
produce even a firebrand like Aneurin Bevan.
To those who want to understand why Indian socialism became affete and ineffective,
this book should be a good guide.
The Mainstream, Delhi M.S.N. MENON

AMERICAS
STRATEGY FOR REVOLUTION By Regis Debray Jonathan Cape London. 1970.
266p. 38s.
T a time when many a Marxist is tempted to opt for the painless path to socialism
A through peaceful competition between the Soviet Union and the United Stat,=,
when Marxian analysis tends to degenerate,into a kind of fortune-telling by which
a society’s future can be divided from its economic entra!ls, and when even the New Left
appears to be exhausted, confused, and drifting, the publication of this collection of Regis
Debray’s essay is most refreshing.
The Cuban Revolution attracted Debray, a gifted philosophy student of Ecole
Normule in Paris, to Fidel, Che and to Latin America where he gathered first-hand insight
into the travails of revolutionary movements. His method was “to draw on his intimate
and personal knowledge of the struggle to provide both evocative reportage of the revo-
lutionary experience and a critical reflection on that experience that could help to inform
and correct revolutionary action.”
Debray believes that modern revolutions do not happen, they are made. He views
revolution as a .project rather than a fatality; for history does not conveniently furnish
all its preconditions. The project, in turn, calls for a combination of revolutionary
ethics and insurrectionary technics. “The duty of every revolutionary is to make the revo-
lution.” But he must also evolve and master its operational rules. Here Debray pro-
pounds the concept of the foco or the centre where revolution in the Latin American
conditions must be first ignited. Geographically thefoco must be where the class contra-
dictions in an agrarian feudal society are at their most violent yet outside the framework
of the repressive machinery concentrated in the t0wns-e.g. Salta in Argentina or Sierra
Maestra in Cuba. Chronologically the insurrection must seize upon that “turning point”
in the history of the growing revolution when the activity of its “advanced ranks” are at
its height and the vacillations in the “enemy camp” are strongest.
Foco, then is the only effective alternative to the much-too-familiar coup derur or the
military rising which only yields populist regimes incapable of changing the oppressive
social order: or to “revolutionary mass action” preached by the reformist communist
parti?. The term ‘‘masses? says Debray, is like an inverted Sorelian myth, a cover for
inaction. And a mass action as such “has never achieved power anywhere.” Debray
does admit that guemlla warfare based on the doctrine offqco has not been an unqualified
success everywhere in Latin Amer1.c-a; but he ascribes its failure to “a too hasty imitation
of the Cuban model.” This is reminiscent of the repetition of the Bolshevik model attempt-
ed by the Spartakists in Germany and by the Hungarian Commune of Bela Kun, both
crushed in early 1919.
While mechanistic application of the Cuban model is fraught with perils the Cuban
Revolution itself is an important turning point in Latin American history. Before it,
most Marxist leaders and theoreticians imported prefabriFated strate.gies and concepts
from Europe, and Marxism had not “found its correct articulahon w1th.a social reality
so atypical, by European standards, as Latin America.” In other words, it demonstrated
the irrelevance of the Soviet and Chinese models to the Latin American situation.
As to the role of the socialist camp in Latin America’s current struggle Debray main-
tains that the absence of a purely Latin American revolutionary centre in the past had
produced the almost automatic alignment of liberation movements towards one or other
of the recognized centres, namely Peking and Moscow. But as continental perspective