रशिया : एक कुतूहल १

The incident is actually quite old. When I was a kid, probably in the 2nd or 3rd grade, my father used to teach me geography at home. We had a special geography book based on the geography of our district. I wasn't interested in reading the geography text, but it was interesting to see the different maps in my book. One day, I came across Tai's (my elder sister) geography book, who was in the 6th grade. There was a very big folded color map of world geography inside her book. Out of curiosity, I saw that map, and after India, the first country that I noticed was the Soviet Union. I was very amazed to see a country of such a large size that occupied a much larger part of the map. When I asked my sister about it, she told me that the Soviet Union doesn't exist anymore and that it's divided into 15 republics, and the map was an old one (she might have been told this by her teacher). This was the first time I came across the name Russia, or more precisely, the Soviet Union. This incident made me more curious about Russia. So I started gathering more information about Soviet Russia that was available with my friends and elders in our village. There were very few resource persons in my village who could tell me more about this. Finally, it was only Bandu, my elder brother's friend who was even older than him. Bandu used to stay at our the district town and was a voracious reader of newspapers. When I asked him, Bandu shed light on many things unknown to us, including the presence of two superpowers in the world, the other being the US, and how the disintegration of Russia has made the US the sole superpower. He finally concluded that the US is the Boss of the world, and India has lost its best friend. This was the first time I came to know about the much-talked-about and sometimes hyped friendship between India and Russia. The third thing that made the case of Russia very interesting was that with growing age, I developed an interest in knowing about communism. I found Soviet Russia to be the epitome of communism (and Indian communists). No talk about communism could be complete without mentioning Russia. At the same time, the regime of terror unleashed by Stalin particularly during great purge which resulted in persecutions of many Soviet citizens, including old Bolsheviks, made me read more and more. Finally, there is another reason for my affection towards Russia, which has nothing to do with geography, world affairs, and history but is related to life, where we used to compare many of HER things with that of Russia (no details of this 😊). When we think about Russia, we generally think about Russia after the revolution of 1917. The history of Russia before 1917 is very relevant to understanding the contemporary world. It is often said about Russia that it is the only country whose history changes after a regime change