Minoo Masani’s Disenchantment with the Soviet Economic Model - In Conversation with Zareer Masani

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLJXAWvmi18 Duration: 117.2s

Zareer Masani (00:05): He made a couple of trips to Russia. I think one in the nineteen twenties and one later in the nineteen thirties. And on both occasions, he traveled quite widely and was sympathetic to the Russian experiment, but noticed all kinds of things which people like Krishna Menon and Nehru didn’t when they went. I mean, he noticed the fact that it was being run as a dictatorship, one party state, that, you know, there was a lot of one didn’t know the full extent then of Stalin’s purges and the gulags and how many people were killed, but he saw the tip of the iceberg and didn’t like what he saw. So he came back to India around 1930 as a socialist but quite an anti-communist socialist. He also wrote a book called Socialism Reconsidered, which was his, you know, reasons for disenchantment with the Soviet model and Stalin’s purges and why what the role of the communists in India and why socialism itself needed to be reconsidered.