Brajesh Singh (, Kunwar Brijesh Singh or Brajesh Singh Lal; died 31 October 1966) was an Indian politician belonging to the Communist Party of India (CPI). He hailed from the royal family of Kalakankar near Allahabad and his nephew Dinesh Singh was a minister in the Indian cabinet.
His first wife was Kunwarani Laxmi Devi, followed by Leela, an Austrian woman with whom he had a son named Victor Singh. Victor later moved to England where he became a photographer. In 1963, while recuperating from bronchitis, Singh met Svetlana Alliluyeva, the only daughter of Joseph Stalin. The two fell in love while Singh was critically ill with bronchiectasis and emphysema. The romance deepened while the couple were recuperating in Sochi near the Black Sea.
Singh returned to Moscow in 1965 to work as a translator, but he and Alliluyeva were not allowed to marry. He died the following year, on 31 October 1966. In an interview on 26 April 1967, she said that she considered Singh to be her husband but that Aleksei Kosygin never allowed them to legally marry.
Biography
Singh was born to Raja Ramesh Singh, the taluqdar royal of the Kalakankar. His birthdate is uncertain. His father Raja Rampal Singh was a founding member of the Indian National Congress (INC) and his grandfather Lal Pratap Singh was a leader in the Indian Rebellion of 1857.
Singh studied English at a college in Lucknow. He later moved to Berlin, to pursue an engineering education. In 1928, M. N. Roy was expelled from the Communist International, he then moved to Berlin and from there he enlisted the help of several Indian students. Singh was one of those students who became an active communist and began closely working with him to establish the Group of Oppositional Indian Communists that would be affiliated with the Communist Party of Germany Opposition and INC. The primary reason for the establishment of the organisation was to protest the Ultra-leftist attitude of the Communist International in India. While in India, Roy also suggested that Indian communists were distancing themselves from the Nationalist movement.
During the course of this campaign, Singh served as Roy's right-hand man. He also financed Roy's health care in Switzerland and his trip to India. However in 1931 when Roy was arrested in India, Singh decided to relinquish Roy's principles and defected back to the orthodox communist stronghold in Europe. When he arrived in London in September 1932, he came across his brother Raja Awadhesh Singh, who had been regularly commuting from London to Dublin. Brajesh's previous passport was impounded in India, so he had been to Ireland using his brother's passport. While he was crossing over to Ireland, the Indian Political Intelligence was actively monitoring Singh's activities.
After arriving in Dublin, Singh applied for an Irish Free State emergency passport that would be valid for five years, which provided him with ample time in Europe. Later he managed to make his way back to Berlin. The IPI failed to prove his fraudulent use of passports in order to revoke his emergency passport, and concluded that it was better to have him outside India, because his financial assets in support of the CPI would cause difficulties for the British Raj. His file was closed in the mid-1930s. Singh's nephew Dinesh Singh become the successor after his father, Raja Awadhesh Singh.
Singh's first wife was Kunwarani Laxmi Devi, followed by Leela, an Austrian Jewish woman from Vienna whom Singh married during the Second World War. Singh and Leela both fled to India to escape Nazi persecution, where they lived for 16 years. After the war, Leela moved to England with their son Victor. Singh followed her, but due to his inability to find work in England, he returned back to India after divorcing her. While there, his son Victor became a photographer.
Stay in Soviet Union
In October 1963, while recuperating from bronchitis at Kuntsevo Hospital, Singh met Svetlana Alliluyeva, who was there for a tonsillectomy. At the time, Svetlana was reading a biography on Mahatma Gandhi and wanted to ask an Indian like Singh about the subject. After bumping into each other in the corridors, they took a seat on a nearby couch and had keen conversation for an hour.