Why India and Russia still understand each other: The long affair

Russian MiG fighter planes in the 1950s, and Raj Kapoor in Moscow sometime in the 1960s. (Raj Kapoor's photo by: Игорь Кошельков; both images via Wikimedia Commons)

Raj Kapoor once sang 'Mera Joota Hai Japani' before an audience of teary-eyed Russians who swayed as though they had found in his song a mirror of their own melancholy. Decades later, Dostoevsky’s 'White Nights' became a fleeting favourite among Gen-Z readers who discovered its aching solitude on social media. Between these two cultural moments lies a thread of two civilisations that never needed translation to understand each other’s loneliness, pride, and moral complexity.

I grew up in an India that had Soviet cultural centres and where one could get 'Misha' magazines — those charming children’s books that offered glimpses of another world. For an older generation, Russia (or rather the then-USSR) was the benevolent friend who sent us engineers, built our steel plants and dubbed our films. For today’s India, it is a remnant of an older order, known more for strategic ties than cultural allure.

Today, as the United States tries to rearrange the world’s friendships in its own image, India’s long affair with Russia stands at a fascinating crossroad. The West would like to cast itself as the rightful partner — urbane, powerful, indispensable. But Russia remains that old companion who, despite a battered past and difficult temperament, knows us too well to be easily replaced.

For newly Independent India, the Soviet embrace came without sermons on human rights or market reform. It offered machines, not manifestos.

The roots of this relationship stretch back to the first decades after independence, when Jawaharlal Nehru’s socialist imagination found natural resonance in Moscow. The Soviet Union, unlike the West, treated India not as a fledgling democracy to be tutored, but as a fellow traveller in the experiment of self-reliance. It was the USSR that helped build India’s steel plants in Bhilai and Bokaro, the same nation that transferred technology for MiG fighters and nuclear reactors when few others would.

The bitterness between the United States and the Soviet Union began almost as soon as the Second World War ended. Allies in battle but adversaries in belief, the two emerged from 1945 with clashing visions of how the world should be ordered: one championing free markets and democracy, the other preaching state control and socialist solidarity. By 1946, Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech had given a name to the divide, and within a year, the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan signalled America’s resolve to contain communism through aid and influence. Moscow responded by cementing control over Eastern Europe, creating its own economic and ideological bloc. The Berlin Blockade of 1948, and later the formation of NATO in 1949, turned suspicion into confrontation. Thus began the Cold War, a 40-year standoff of ideologies, arsenals and proxy wars that would shape the destinies of nations far beyond the two superpowers themselves, including India.

No wonder, enough (James) Bond movies had the Cold War as its curtain.

For India, which was still learning the language of industrial modernity, this was more than strategic cooperation. The Soviet embrace came without sermons on human rights or market reform. It offered machines, not manifestos.

A generation of us grew up with the word cosmonaut in our vocabulary due to what USSR offered as part of the Intercosmos programme; the first Indian man in space — Wing Commander Rakesh Sharma — went to space on the Soyuz T-11 mission, launched in 1984 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. The India–Russia relationship was historically known for being deep, dependable and multidimensional — combining defence trust, scientific cooperation, and cultural warmth. Well, the word ‘astronaut’ was known to us much later.

And yet, the bond was not merely utilitarian. At a subtler level, both societies shared an understanding of melancholy: the Russian belief in endurance, the Indian instinct for patience. In literature and cinema, from Leo Tolstoy’s moral struggles to Satyajit Ray’s introspection, the emotional climate often seemed familiar. Both nations believed that greatness and suffering were inseparable companions.

Wing Commander Rakesh Sharma (bottom left) went to space on the Soyuz T-11, launched in 1984 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. (Photo credit: Indian Air Force via Wikimedia Commons)

The breakup of the Soviet Union was a global earthquake. As the empire collapsed into chaos, a rare window opened for India — to buy into Russian industries, acquire technology, and build long-term stakes in a reconfiguring economy. Instead, we hesitated.

A few agile intermediaries made fortunes in trading and currency arbitrage, trading roubles, dollars, and rupees through opaque routes. But India’s manufacturing giants including the private sector, still burdened by the licence-permit legacy, lacked the instinct for acquisition. Our industrial houses were cautious, even timid. The era’s political and bureaucratic machinery, trapped in protectionist reflexes, could not grasp the sheer scale of what was unfolding.

Had India been more daring, it could have bought factories, shipping yards, and even oil fields for a fraction of their value. That lost decade remains one of our quiet what-ifs, when friendship could have become economic integration.

Even so, the relationship endured. When Western capitals oscillated between enthusiasm and admonition for India’s domestic choices, Moscow remained steadfast. A significant percentage of India’s military hardware still originates from Russia. From the BrahMos missile programme to the leasing of nuclear submarines, Moscow remains enmeshed in our defence architecture.

Yet India’s new partnerships with France, Israel and the US show a quiet hedging. Both nations understood that independence is never merely about borders. It is about refusing to be told what one’s interests should be.

In today’s world of economic coercion and sanctions, Russia’s resilience has an appeal for India. It reminds us that a nation can be battered and yet unbowed. The Russian state, for all its flaws and opacity, has survived what many predicted would be its dissolution. It retains its nuclear arsenal, its vast scientific base, and a capacity to reinvent itself in the face of hostility.

2017 Russian postage stamps depicting Russian and Indian dance. (Image credit: Почта России via Wikimedia Commons)

Washington’s narrative often oscillates between flattery and reproach: that India is the world’s largest democracy but must prove it, that we are a strategic partner but only if we align to its wishes. The metaphor of a “mistress dispeller” may be playful, but America’s real ambition is more imperial than romantic. It wants to be the world’s sole arbiter of affection, the indispensable ally whose approval becomes a form of currency. In this theatre of global diplomacy, it is disapproving of co-stars; it seeks disciples.

Of course, the world has changed. India now trades more with the United States, Europe, and even China than with Russia. Yet beneath the transactional flows lies a deeper understanding - that in a multipolar world, friendships cannot be dictated.

As new powers rise and old ones cling to pride, India’s task is not to pick sides but to define its own centre. The Russia of today is neither the USSR nor weak, and India is no longer the hesitant economy it once was.

Theirs is the relationship of two old friends who have seen the world change too often to be shocked by its latest convulsions.