On Saturday, August 27, Sonia Gandhi’s mother, 98-year-old Paola Maino passed away at her home in Italy. The funeral for her was held the next day, the Congress party shared on Wednesday. Sonia Gandhi left for Italy on August 23 to be with her mother during her final days.
While Sonia Gandhi was very close to her mother and heavily influenced by her throughout her life, Sonia’s parents themselves were apparently very influenced by Russia and Russian culture. Congress sympathising journalist Rasheed Kidwai shared the same while writing about Paola Maino following her death.
Writing in India Today, Kidwai shares that Sonia’s parents were influenced heavily by the Russian language, culture, food, and they loved the country as a whole. The Mainos also conversed in Russian in their home instead of native Italian or Spanish, and even gave their daughters names like Nadia and Anushka, inspired by Russian culture.
Apparently, this Russian influence on the Mainos started when Sonia Gandhi’s father Stefano was fighting in Russia alongside the Germans during the second world war. Stefano Maino was a soldier in Mussolini’s army, a German ally during the second world war.
Sonia Gandhi and her own connections to Russia
The current interim Congress president enjoyed a good personal rapport with Russian President Vladimir Putin during the UPA’s years in power. In fact, Sonia Gandhi’s meeting with Putin in St Petersburg was described as one of the most productive meetings to develop India-Russia relations.
Sonia Gandhi also took two visits to Russia in 2018 in the middle of the Rafale controversy in Indian politics. The visits were to participate in Eurasian Women’s Forum, organised by the Federation Council of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation and the Interparliamentary Assembly of Member Nations of the Commonwealth of Independent States, and to inaugurate Indira exhibition in Moscow. Netizens had theorised at the time if those visits were actually a cover for something else.
These surprise visits to Russia are not new for the Gandhi family. Back in 1985, Rajiv Gandhi made a surprise visit to Moscow to discuss a Kremlin arms control proposal with then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. A now-declassified December 1985 CIA report said that the Soviets pumped in a huge amount of cash to influence Indian politicians, including a large number of Congress MPs during Prime Minister Indira Gandhis government, to influence Indian policies.
A Telegraph report states that a book, co-authored by Christopher Andrew, professor of contemporary history with KGB defector ‘The Mitrokhin Archive Volume II’, states 10 Indian newspapers were on KGB payroll. KGB was the main security agency for the Soviet Union till the dissolution of the Soviet state. The book reportedly says how India in the 1970s under Indira Gandhi was one of the countries most successfully penetrated by Soviet intelligence. The book alleges that the Congress coffers during Indira Gandhi’s regime were filled by KGB and the principal fundraiser, Lalit Narayan Mishra knew he was accepting Soviet money.
By the late 1960s, and certainly, after 1971 when Indira Gandhi government signed Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation with USSR, Indian foreign policy moved away from the traditional Nehruvian non-alignment stance to a more explicit pro-Soviet stance.
