A Forgotten Revolutionary: Virendranath Chattopadhyay

[Sukla Sen]

A remarkably fascinating character, Virendranath Chattopadhyay or "Chatto" - as he was popularly known, like his decidedly more famous contemporary Manabendra Nath Roy, was among the very first emigre Indian Communists who had graduated from being revolutionary Indian nationalists.

The account below, highly informed and interesting as it seems, however, doesn't throw any light on why Stalin had got him killed. Of course, execution of suspected dissenters from within the ranks of the Communist Party was, as would later be revealed, too commonplace in those days. Stalin was, perhaps, too paranoid and so was the "system" itself that he had succeeded in putting in place.

If memory serves me right, once Ashok Mitra - a person of formidable intellect and scholarship, had penned quite a disparaging note on Chatto in his column, captioned 'Calcutta Diary', in the EPW. Rather needlessly.

Most likely, just for having the misfortune of being one of Stalin's countless victims - a few famous and too many faceless with quite a large number falling in between.

<<With the spectre of Nazism looming large, Chatto left Germany for Moscow in August 1931. He was thereafter appointed a researcher at the Institute of Anthropology and Ethnography (IAE) in Leningrad. Chatto was now Virendranat Agornatovich Chatopadaya. As Barooah reveals, Chatto awaited the arrival of his German wife Charlotte with her children from Berlin. Nothing is known of her. He soon became intimate with Lidiya Karunovskaya, a married fellow scholar. She found him to be “a profoundly social, caring, generous and hardworking person” and they married by the end of 1933. He thereafter had a productive academic career, also fulfilling party duties. But that did not last – on the night of July 16, 1937 Chatto was spirited away by Stalin’s secret police. Lidiya desperately searched for him, in vain. In March 1958, she was issued a death certificate that stated that Chatto had died on April 6, 1943. The Russian historian Mithrokin later accessed KGB archival documents showing that Chatto was executed on September 2, 1937.>>

(Excerpted from: <https://m.thewire.in/article/history/virendranath-chatto-chattopadhyay-romances>.)

So, he had, allegedly, been abducted in July 1937; death certificate would be issued to his wife in March 1958 - just a short two decades after - and Stalin having been well buried, both physically and metaphorically.

Was executed in September 1937?