Ties that bind

Foreign policy experts quickly defined India’s position, putting it in simple economic terms: Russian oil is cheap and India is among its most voracious consumers. But analysts now estimate that the punishing new tariffs could cost India more than double what it has saved buying Russian oil. Still, India has shown no signs of backing down, and has instead been growing closer to Russia and China.

India’s cultural ties with Russia may offer some insight into its defiant attitude. The impact of more than a century of meaningful exchange — spanning political activism, books, music and film — is visible in the landscapes of Moscow and New Delhi, and both Vladimir Putin and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi have used this history to strengthen their countries’ alliances and form strategic partnerships. These ties also reveal the difficulty of persuading India to see Russia as the perpetrator of a brutal colonial war in Ukraine.

Letter to a Hindu

On the centenary of Leo Tolstoy’s death, in 2010, Russian writer Dmitry Bykov and Tolstoy biographer Rosamund Bartlett both noted the Kremlin’s conspicuous silence on one of the world’s most celebrated authors.

“Certainly at the official level there seems no place for the views of a vegetarian pacifist anarchist who preached the brotherhood of man in a country which now exalts machismo, patriotic duty and strong government,” Bartlett wrote.

The Russian government has displayed no such reticence in India, however, celebrating Tolstoy’s influence on the vegetarian pacifist anarchist Mahatma Gandhi. During a 2021 trip to Delhi, Vladimir Tolstoy, a descendant of the Russian writer and an adviser to Putin on cultural affairs, said that the seven letters exchanged between his ancestor and Gandhi could even advance the Russian-Indian “Special and Privileged Strategic Partnership”.

Russia has repeatedly and publicly affirmed the importance of Leo Tolstoy’s influence on Gandhi: at the State Duma, annually in front of a statue of Tolstoy in the Indian capital, and at the BRICS summit in Kazan last year.

“India and Russia are always together when it comes to their cultural relationship,” said Venkatesh Kumar, an Indian filmmaker who was once invited to Tolstoy’s estate to discuss the writer’s influence on Tamil literature. “But when it comes to diplomacy, India takes a different stand,” he insisted. (In 2022, Modi chided Putin for starting a war against Ukraine.)

Kumar is an honoured artist of the Russian Federation and works as an expert at the Moscow-based network TV BRICS. He told Novaya Europe that this work amounted to an appeal for Russia to follow more of Tolstoy’s principles, including his passionate anti-war stance. “If Tolstoy would have become a leader, Russia would have been something else. But instead we got Lenin and we got Stalin and we got Putin.”

Indian films and Soviet books

Among the many tectonic shifts that occurred in the USSR in the wake of Joseph Stalin’s death was the emergence, in 1954, of the first Indian film festival in Moscow. Millions of Soviet citizens saw the Indian actor Raj Kapoor singing in The Vagabond (Brodyaga in Russian and Awaara in Hindi), and the film quickly became a sensation. With nearly 64 million viewers, The Vagabond remained the Soviet Union’s single most popular film that decade, generating interest in Indian cinema that lasted until the USSR’s collapse in 1991.

“Several of my Russian and Ukrainian and other Slavic interlocutors would say there is a kind of cultural affinity between the Russian soul and the Indian soul,” the foremost expert on Indian Cinema in the Soviet Union, Sudha Rajagopalan, told Novaya Gazeta Europe. “People felt there was a great deal that we had in common culturally.”

Later, Rajagopalan examined the impact of Soviet books in India, many of which achieved cult status and were an important part of her own childhood on the subcontinent during the Cold War. The Soviet Union translated Russian-language books into 13 widely-spoken Indian languages plus English in what may have been the largest translation programme in the world, and sold them cheaply and widely in India.

Rajagopalan interviewed Indian scientists who continued to prize their Soviet books for how clearly they explained complex concepts, and other readers who found familiar scenes in the factories and fields that formed the settings of Soviet literature.

“People from Ukraine and other parts of the former Soviet Union who would like us to acknowledge that their experience was colonial find it really hard to find audiences in India,” Rajagopalan said. “Putin is playing on this cultural history.”

Why not Moscow?

State-run Russian media regularly draws on Indian nostalgia for the cultural ties it once shared with the Soviet Union. On the website of Russian propaganda broadcaster RT, in a section dedicated to India coverage, one article recently asserted that the reception of Indian films in Soviet cinemas created “an unbreakable connection between India and Russia”. On another state-run site, readers can find an alternative history of the war in Ukraine written in Hindi. After the full-scale invasion, Indian officials reportedly rebuffed attempts to ban RT for its peddling of Russian misinformation.

In July, when Russia expanded its drone strikes on Ukraine, killing or injuring more civilians than at any other time in three years, Indians would not read about it in RT. If they happened to look at state-run Russian media, they might see a very different record touted by Yevgeny Kozlov, the head of Moscow’s tourism committee. Moscow received 18,000 Indian tourists in the first quarter of 2025, he said, the latest increase in a three-year trend, although Indian tourism to the US has dropped amid tariff tensions.

“Interest in Moscow has grown, year-by-year, by about 40%” said Kozlov. As for Russians, “India is Moscow's second-largest tourist destination”. While Kozlov says he wants to phase out Russian visa requirements for Indian citizens, the Trump administration last week made it harder for highly-skilled Indians to obtain visas to work in the US.

The decision spread panic and confusion among Indians already living in the US and led to reports of people unsure if they could leave the country to attend their own weddings.

These starkly different approaches to India are something that Modi seemed to remark on earlier this month: “Even in the most difficult situations, India and Russia have always walked shoulder to shoulder.”

Modi is said to have met Putin some two dozen times in the last decade, and very often calls him a friend. Most Indians appear to share his view. In 2023, the nonpartisan Pew Research Center surveyed thousands of people from 24 countries and found that Indians stood out as the only country where a majority of people had both “a favourable opinion of Russia” and “confidence” in Vladimir Putin.