Mainstream WeeklyJawaharlal Nehru’s first visit to the Soviet Union in 1927 was connected with the Tenth Anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution. His two subsequent visits were in 1955 and 1961, after he became the Prime Minister of Independent India. Of these the 1927 visit has a special importance.
From the early days of the October Revolution, Nehru closely followed the socialist transfor-mations in Soviet Russia, studied her experience, and strove to use it in the interests of the freedom movement in India. To gain a deeper under-standing of the course of the world’s revolutionary process, Nehru studied the works of Marx and Lenin which, by his own admission, substantially influenced his views on the ways and laws of world social development. In doing so, as Nehru pointed out in one of his articles, he was deeply impressed in those years by Lenin’s work, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, and the book written by the American journalist, John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World.
Later, Nehru wrote the following about that period: "We began a new phase in our struggle for freedom in India at about the same time as the October Revolution led by the great Lenin. We admired Lenin whose example influenced us greatly."
No wonder he wanted to visit the Soviet Union and see things at first hand. Such an opportunity offered itself in November 1927, when Jawaharlal Nehru, together with his father Motilal Nehru, was invited by the USSR Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries to attend the celebrations of the Tenth Anniversary of the October Revolution.
On November 7, 1927, Jawaharlal Nehru together with his father, wife and sister set his foot on Soviet soil for the first time at the small border station of Negoreloye. There, right at the station, he was welcomed by the local residents.
Many friends of the Soviet Union had come to Moscow in those days. Among them were the French writers Henri Barbusse, Paul Vaillant Couturier, the former captain of the French Army, Jacques Sadoul, who later won world fame as a film director, the 82-year-old Antoine Gueux, who had taken part in the Paris Commune, Revolutionry leaders from various countries like Clara Zetkin, Bela Kun, Sen Katayama, Gallacher, and many others.
India was also represented at the celebrations by some revolutionary and democratic leaders. The newspaper Pravda, the central organ of the Bolshevik Party, in its issue dated November 5, 1927, reported how invitations to Indian democrats had been sent and the reaction of the British colonial aluthorities to them. In a special article devoted to India, Pravda said that the invitations had been dispatched in good time to Indian political organisations, as, for instance, to the Workers’ and Peasants’ Parties of Bengal, Bombay, Madras and Rajputana. These invitations had been intercepted by the British Government, which had not permitted their delivery.
Invitations had also been sent to prominent politicians and public leaders and leaders of the national liberation movement. The delivery of telegrams with these individual invitations had been allowed by the British censor. Published in the Indian press, they caused a “sensation