The Bolsheviks overthrew the Provisional Government in Russia and heralded the rise of the Soviet Union in 1917 on 7th November, hundred years back. The Bolsheviks later reconstituted themselves as the communists.
Rabindranath Tagore visited communist Soviet in 1930, thirteen years later. He stayed there for fourteen days, from 11th September to 25th September. He was appalled by some significant socio-economic changes which took place under the communists.
Religion was done away with by the state. Tagore supported it wholeheartedly. Education was given priority. Tagore liked it. The oppressed found their due space in the society. Tagore saluted it. Land was distributed to those who tilled it. Tagore, as a rural activist, bowed his head to it.
But Tagore sensed coercion taking place behind all these sweeping changes. He believed that by suppressing the freedom of mind of people no good can be done to them. To him the Bolshevism (his own coined word) was akin to the Fascism in terms of coercion.
In 1939 he told his confidante, Rani Chando, that Soviet Union would collapse because the fall was inescapably inevitable.
The communist Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 at a gap of just over fifty years of Tagore’s prediction.
This year is the centennial of communist Soviet Union revolution. Communists there are no more. No more are the soviets (assembly of grassroot communities). Russia replaces Soviet Union.
To revive communism, comrades now need to focus more on Tagore, his thoughts, his vision of co-operative and work in rural area, than prostrating over heaps of books of Marx, Engles, Lenin and Stalin. It is time to reflect, not deflect through inane rhetorics.