The October Revolution is remembered on November 7, though the Bolsheviks took power on October 25 by the calendar Russia then kept. This year marks its 109th anniversary. The commemorations make little room for Ghulam Ambia Khan Lohani, born in Sirajganj in 1892 and shot at the Kommunarka shooting ground outside Moscow on September 17, 1938 by the state whose revolution had won him over in wartime London.
He came back into view slowly, and in Bangladesh late. Leonid Mitrokhin first revealed, in a 1991 article in Soviet Land, a magazine printed in Delhi, that Lohani was one of three Bengalis, alongside Virendranath Chattopadhyaya and Abani Mukherji, shot in Moscow during the purges, all three from what is now Bangladesh.
Matiur Rahman, editor of Prothom Alo, had heard the name a decade earlier in Delhi from communist leader Gangadhar Adhikari. He spent 42 years researching archives in Berlin, Moscow, Delhi and Kolkata before Ghulam Ambia Khan Luhani: Ek Ojana Biplobir Kahini appeared in October 2024. Khalilullah retold the story in The Daily Star in February 2025.
Much of what follows rests on Matiur Rahman’s book, Khalilullah’s account and the Comintern records. Lohani’s nephews, Fateh Lohani and Fazle Lohani, are familiar names from Bangladeshi film and television. Their uncle was seldom mentioned.
Lohani went to October on purpose, and early. In January 1919, the British Empire Union wrote to the Home Office about a London conference demanding the withdrawal of British troops from Russia. It asked for Lohani, a speaker billed as a member of the Industrial Workers of the World, to be deported, since the country had no use for ‘scum of the earth’.
That year he married Gabrielle Soene at Pancras. She was a model who had sat for Modigliani’s drawings and for Roger Fry. Two years later, Lohani was in Moscow for the Third Comintern Congress. With Chattopadhyaya and Pandurang Khankhoje, he sent Lenin a fourteen-page thesis arguing that socialism in India would first require the defeat of British imperialism.
It ranked British India first among the colonies of Asia and Africa in importance to the world revolution, then offered a sobering qualification: the Indian working class numbered at most five million out of 315 million and was divided by caste and religion. Lenin’s outgoing mail register lists a letter to the three dated 8 July 1921. The letter itself is missing.
In February 1924, he wrote from Paris to his mother in Sirajganj, asking for money and complaining of poor health. His marriage was failing. At some point, the family tried to bring him home through a British officer and a Kolkata shipping agency. When this happened, and how far the effort progressed, remains unclear. In 1925, France withdrew his residency over his anti-British activity, and Moscow became home.
He taught Bengali at the Institute of Oriental Studies and lectured at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East. In November 1927, Motilal and Jawaharlal Nehru arrived as guests for the revolution’s tenth anniversary, and Lohani, according to Rahman’s reconstruction, interpreted for them. The following year he joined the Soviet party. In 1933, he became a Soviet citizen.
The trouble came to a head at the Sixth Congress in 1928, as the Comintern turned to its Third Period and abandoned the united fronts Lohani had praised. Otto Kuusinen attacked his ‘poetical description of industrialization and decolonization’ and accused him of harbouring illusions about nationalism.
Lohani answered the charge twice. By the July 1929 plenum, he had renounced his old views and branded MN Roy, his close associate until Roy left the Soviet Union the previous year, a counter-revolutionary. The denunciation did not save him.
Soviet intelligence papers reproduced in Rahman’s book show the suspicion surrounding Lohani under Stalin. On 27 February 1938, the NKVD arrested him on an espionage charge. Six months and three weeks later, on 17 September, he was dead. According to Khalilullah’s account, the order came from Stalin. The last known photograph of Lohani was taken in NKVD custody shortly before his execution. An earlier photograph, signed for his Aligarh classmate Aminul Haq, survives.
He had been a Soviet citizen for five years and a party member for ten. The charge had its own absurdity: France had expelled him over his anti-British activity, and Moscow shot him as a spy. In July 1957, almost nineteen years later, the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court reviewed his case and found no evidence against him. The other two Bengalis had been shot in 1937 and were cleared in 1956 and 1957.
Defenders of the early revolution distinguish the violence of 1937 from what preceded it, and the numbers support that distinction. Yet the argument that Stalin’s paranoia arrived late and corrupted an honest project is harder to sustain against a file like Lohani’s.
What killed him was already in the building: a party line that could reverse within a year and a security apparatus answerable to nobody the accused could reach. Disagreement was filed as treason. Whether Lohani was guilty never entered the procedure; where he stood relative to the party line did.
In 1926, he had argued in the Comintern’s own press that Britain was industrialising its Indian colony. By 1928, the same argument was a deviation, though nothing in it had changed. No source connects that argument to his arrest. It illustrates a political climate in which loyalty meant keeping pace with a line that never announced its direction.
The British Empire Union wanted him out of the country in 1919. Moscow got him out of the world in 1938.
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Mahmud Newaz Joy is a freelance feature writer