Author Archives: Dhruv Dixit

Madam Bhikaji Cama

Madam Bhikaji Cama was the first Indian to appreciate the role of the working class in the 1905 Russian Revolution, the first Indian abroad who got interested in Marxism and the first ever to realise the significance of Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

In a speech that she delivered on August 22, 1907, she said: “I stand before the tribunal of human justice because Socialism spells Justice…I believe a day will come when India will awake and follow the example of our Russian Comrades to whom we particularly send our fraternal greetings.”

Vladimir Lenin

Born to a upper middle-class family in Simbirsk, Lenin embraced revolutionary socialist politics following his brother’s 1887 execution. Expelled from Kazan Imperial University for participating in protests against the Russian Empire’s Tsarist government, he devoted the following years to a law degree. He moved to Saint Petersburg in 1893 and became a senior Marxist activist. In 1897, he was arrested for sedition and exiled to Shushenskoye for three years, where he married Nadezhda Krupskaya. After his exile, he moved to Western Europe, where he became a prominent theorist in the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP). In 1903, he took a key role in the RSDLP ideological split, leading the Bolshevik faction against Julius Martov’s Mensheviks. Following Russia’s failed Revolution of 1905, he campaigned for the First World War to be transformed into a Europe-wide proletarian revolution, which, as a Marxist, he believed would cause the overthrow of capitalism and its replacement with socialism. After the 1917 February Revolution ousted the Tsar and established a Provisional Government, he returned to Russia to play a leading role in the October Revolution in which the Bolsheviks overthrew the new regime.

Madam Bhikaji Cama

Madam Bhikaji Cama was the first Indian to appreciate the role of the working class in the 1905 Russian Revolution, the first Indian abroad who got interested in Marxism and the first ever to realise the significance of Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

In a speech that she delivered on August 22, 1907, she said: “I stand before the tribunal of human justice because Socialism spells Justice…I believe a day will come when India will awake and follow the example of our Russian Comrades to whom we particularly send our fraternal greetings.”

Tsar Alexander II

Alexander’s most significant reform as emperor was the emancipation of Russia’s serfs in 1861, for which he is known as Alexander the Liberator. The tsar was responsible for other reforms, including reorganizing the judicial system, setting up elected local judges, abolishing corporal punishment, promoting local self-government through the zemstvo system, imposing universal military service, ending some privileges of the nobility, and promoting university education. After an assassination attempt in 1866, Alexander adopted a somewhat more reactionary stance until his death.

The following are the three ways in which the socio-religious reform movements contributed to the growth of Indian nationalism: … The reformers often condemned untouchability and sought to abolish the caste system. Their ideas of equality and brotherhood attracted the so called ‘lower castes’ to the national mainstream.