Soviet teachers of Russian in Indian universities in the late 1950s and early 1960s

During the 1950s, the Soviet Union and India established relations termed as “friendship” involving cultural exchange, development aid and trade. To support its political and economic cooperation with India, Moscow launched a large-scale public diplomacy campaign. Teaching Russian became one of the core elements of this effort. The article examines the experiences of the first Soviet teachers of Russian at Indian universities and explores the Soviet Union’s efforts to promote its socialist version of modernity through language classes. As the paper argues, even though these teachers had no special training in propaganda, they sought to promote the Soviet Union’s socialist ideas in many ways. This provoked reactions from Indian university and government officials who saw the classes of Soviet teachers as an instrument to carry out communist propaganda

Communism · Cultural exchange · Diplomacy · Economic history · Ethnology · Friendship · Government (linguistics · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Soviet union · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · History · Law