NEW DELHI, India, Nov. 21, Reuter: Soviet Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkoy on Saturday unveiled a bronze statue of Vladimir llyich Lenin in South Delhi to mark the start of the largest Soviet festival to be mounted in another country.
The yearlong festival of the USSR in India will bring more than 2,000 performing artists in-clouding the Bolshot Ballet, orchestras, a circus, folk dancers and even Soviet pop singers to some 40 Indian cities.
The Leningrad Hermitage has sent some of its paintings of the 1917 Boshevik revolution will be ‘on display.
The statue, only the third of the revolutionary leader to be erected in India, frequently described as the Soviet Union’s closest friend in ‘South Asia, was unveiled in Nehru Park, a green space in the most exclusively part of New Delhi surrounded by diplomatic missions.
Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, ‘who watched the unveiling, compared Lenin with “another great evolutionary thinker of our century, Mahatma Gandhi”.
He said the 2.65 meter bronze statue would be “a constant reminder of a man who through his vision and his herculean toil outlined new horizons for humanity”.
Article extracted from this publication >> November 27, 1987
