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Comment by bibyte | Hacker News Reader

This is really fascinating. Because even though I am an Indian I didn't know the Soviet Union and India were that close. I wonder if any Indian school books mention this.

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It's good to know the history here. For most of 50s and 60s we were roughly equidistant between US and USSR. It was the crass support for Pakistan's Ayub Khan by Nixon and Kissinger before the Bangladesh war in 1971, which forced India to shift a little closer to the Soviet Union. Both Nixon and Kissinger had a visceral hatred of India and Indira Gandhi - see [1].

The USSR did help us with arms and with votes in the United Nations. While this was generally helpful, it led to a shameful episode when India chose to tacitly support the USSR's invasion of Afghanistan. It may surprise many Indians to know that more recently, inspite of our tilt to the West, we have supported Russia's annexation of Crimea, and we were one of the first major countries to recognize the annexation.

[1] https://www.outlookindia.com/website/story/indira-gandhi-is-...

I do not think that India has recognized that annexation. And there are no major countries that have recognized it.

While I was growing up in the 90s in the same state in India as the author of the article, English translations Soviet science and math books were super cheap (I suspect they were heavily subsidized) and have had a profound impact on me. My mum used to read a lot of the English translations of literary works, but I had no interest in them until I was much older.

During the Cold War India was leaning to the Soviets. Its also the reason why Nato never really tried to stop Pakistan from acquiring the atomic bomb.

Ofcourse nowadays India is a democratic republic with a good relationship with the West.

India did sometimes try to be in a neutral position with respect to both the West and the Soviets, for eg: the Indian Nuclear program had large support from the Canadians. Indian space program had help from the Americans and the French as well as the Soviets.

Absolutely but during the Cold War you had to be either for the US/NATO or Soviet Union/Warsaw pact. The West was terrified of Russia getting a naval base on the Indian Ocean.

Any country that tried to be neutral was considered suspicious.

There was a third path which India did follow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-Aligned_Movement

Lenin called this "useful idiots".

The Non-Aligned Movement was part and parcel "Soviet lite".

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