- Matt Limb
- London
- mattlimb.uk{at}gmail.com
Friends of Hari Kumar feared he might be “brainwashed into becoming a communist” when he left his Indian village as a teenager in 1971 to study medicine in the former Soviet Union.
That didn’t happen, but the nine years in Moscow that set him up for a career as a surgeon in the UK seeded a huge affection for Russia, its people, and culture under Leonid Brezhnev’s grinding regime.
Later, Kumar became a much loved figure at Doncaster Royal Infirmary. He worked there from 1994 to 2023, including 20 years as a consultant orthopaedic surgeon.
He had long wanted to be a writer, too, and fulfilled that ambition with his book, A Different Degree: Memoirs of an Indo-Soviet Doctor, published in 2020. It recalled his experiences from arriving, awestruck, in Moscow aged 17 to his departure shortly after the 1980 Olympics.
“Big Brother,” he noted, was “omnipresent” but he stayed out of the clutches of the KGB. “Brainwashing, in my experience, was a myth,” he concluded.
Kumar was thrilled to join the People’s Friendship …
