I have previously posted about my childhood engagement with Soviet-ude via free CCCP magazines, heavily subsidized novels, the complete works of Marx & Engels hidden in my parents' attic etc. So last night, when I was wandering through cyber-ia (as a poor antidote to raging insomnia), I somehow ended up on the Wiki page of Svetlana Alliluyeva nee Stalina (I think I began at the Wiki page for The Battle Of Kursk – yes, I know the use of WW-II battle histories as sleeping pills is a queer choice), and the following section caught my eye:

In 1963, while in hospital for the removal of her tonsils, she met an Indian communist visiting Moscow, Brajesh Singh. Singh was mild-mannered and idealistic but gravely ill with bronchiectasis and emphesema. They continued and cemented their relationship while recuperating in Sochi, on the Black Sea. Singh returned to Moscow in 1965, to work as a translator, but they were not allowed to marry. Singh died in 1966 and Svetlana was allowed to travel to India to take his ashes back, for his family to pour them into the Ganges. She stayed in the family home in Kalakankar on the banks of the Ganges for two months and became immersed in local customs.

On March 6, 1967, after first having visited the Soviet embassy in New Delhi, Alliluyeva went to the U.S. embassy and formally petitioned Ambassador Chester Bowles for political asylum. This was granted; however, owing to concerns that the Indian government might suffer from possible ill feeling from the Soviet Union, it was arranged for her to leave India immediately for Switzerland, via Rome. She stayed in Switzerland for 6 weeks before proceeding to the United States.

Further cyber-digging into this aspect of Ms. Stalina’s biography led me to the archives of the US Department of State. They contain many declassified missives exchanged between the US Embassy in Delhi and Washington DC, and shed further light into the motivations behind Ms. Stalina’s decision to defect to the bosom of her papa’s mortal enemy. Roughly it goes like this: she falls in love with Brajesh Singh; is not allowed to marry him or travel to India with Mr. Singh by the all knowing Party; Mr. Singh dies; she is given permission to travel to India to immerse his ashes in the Ganges; she defies the Soviet Ambassador, and overstays the fifteen day time limit on her visit to her lover’s village by two months; discovers “God”; is ordered by the Soviets to get on a plane back to Moscow; walks into the US Embassy the night before she is supposed to depart from India and asks for asylum; the Americans put her on a Rome bound plane out of Delhi in the six to eight hour window they had, before the Soviets figured out their beloved babushka had gone AWOL from the Soviet Embassy.

Interestingly, I could also dig out that Brajesh Singh was the uncle of Dinesh Singh, the then Minster of State for External Affairs in the Indira Gandhi government, and came from a zamindari/ aristocratic background. He was also associated with one of the fathers of Indian communism, M.N. Roy*. How a rajasaheb became a communist, and later ended up falling in love with Stalin’s daughter in the USSR, is a good enough plot for an intelligent Bollywood movie (with two or three songs), if not for a novel. So pliss be feeling free to steal this idea/situation for a movie script or a novel if you want to.

*Another totally fascinating dude. He ran around the planet, way back in the 1920s: Berlin, Tokyo, San Fransico, New York, Mexico City, Moscow etc having madcap adventures! The Raj produced far more interesting chaps than ascetic Gandhi.