I fear this foreword is a superfluous piece of writing. for it is no more than a token of my admiration for Harish C. Gupta whose assiduous and excellent translations from Russian into English are a remarkable performance. It so happens that when Mr. Gupta asked me to write a foreword to his translation of N. A. Dobrolyubov's article (1857) on A View of History and the Present Situation in East-India, I had before me a nearly 500-page book of serious studies by several Soviet scholars on the life and work of Swami Vivekananda, all translated from the original Russian by Mr. Gupta and published by the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture in an elegant volume of high value. Gupta's own 15-page introduction to this present brochure precludes the need of a foreword from my pen, but I fear I must yield to his gentle persuasion.
Perhaps one reason for Indo-Soviet amity, a striking feature now for over four decades of contemporary history, has been a long-time Russian predilection for understanding India. The fact of Tsarist Russia forming one-sixth of the earth and sprawling over enormous tracts of Asia as well as Europe perhaps contributed to a certain freedom from die-hard Europe-centric conceptions. Luckily, the Great October Socialist Revolution (1917) was inspired and led by Lenin and his Bolshevik party with the internationalism of Marxism in their bones, and while conscious of "back-ward Russia" having to overtake "civilized Europe", they knew also they had with them the then "awakening" masses of Asia to share the brave, new enterprise of building the world's first socialist commonwealth. Tsarist Russia, of course, was a link in the chain of world imperialism; its policies and geo-political compulsions are seen in being part of the system of imperialism and also necessarily involved in inter-imperialist contradictions. Jealousy of, and rivalry with the empire of Britain in Asia was a feature of Russian history in the century before the Revolution; the struggle for hegemony over large Asian regions, Persia, Afghanistan in especial, marks Anglo-Russian relations; there are picturesque phenomena like Daleep Singh, Ranjit Singh's heir, mollycoddled in the spider's parlour of the British monarchy, tiring of the experience and flirting with hopes of Russian patronage. However, from Afanasy Nikitin in the 15th century to Gerasim Lebedev in the 18th century to Ivan Minayev in the 19th, there was no lack of Russians of character and courage and intellectual eminence who fullthroatedly proclaimed their affinity, even affection, for India and her people.
Russia, traditionally, had her first direct familiarity with India when Afanasy Nikitin, the Russian merchant from the city of Tver, undertook a journey to India in 1471-1474, much before the well known voyage of Vasco da Gama. The account of Afanasy Nikitin's voyage highlighted the big gulf between the prosperity of the rich and the abject misery of the poor in India, thus giving a blow to the centuries old Russian conception that India was only a land of fabulous riches. Behind the apparent luxury and splendour the keen eye of the Russian traveller was able to discern the grievous sides of Indian life, to comprehend that the glittering court, the foreign and native nobility, the alien and home-bred warriors lived, enjoyed their pleasures and amassed wealth at the expense of that rural population which was very poor.
Some sort of contact with India continued also in the 16th century during the reign of Ivan the Terrible (1533-1554), after the seizure of Kazan and Astrakhan, long the centres of the Eastern trade. Although Russia had no official relations with India in the 16th century, individual Russian merchants did nonetheless reach India, and there is evidence that Indian merchants also appeared in Russia and they enjoyed the protection of the Russian rulers. In the 17th century there was a regular colony of Indian merchants in Astrakhan, in Russia, and these Indians were often a good source of information on India.
The visit to India in the late 18th century of the well known Russian theatre director, musician, actor, linguist, Gerasim Lebedev, brought India much closer to the Russians. It is common knowledge that Lebedev established at Calcutta the first professional theatre in the modern sense of the word, and that he made a significant contribution to the propagation of Bengali language and gave his countrymen a first hand idea of the real conditions in India. Even otherwise, the ancient Indian literature was now attracting an ever greater attention in Russia as an evidence of Indian wisdom and as an example of Indian literary maturity. Based on an English translation of the Indian classic, Bhaga-vadgita, the distinguished Russian historian and writer, Nikolai Karamzin, translated this great work into Russian in 1788. Four years later, viz. in 1792, the same Nikolai Karamzin made a partial translation into Russian of Sakuntala, the famous work of the Sanskrit dramatist Kalidasa.
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