Learning from the East: Soviet Experts and India in the Era of Competitive Coexistence

Engerman’s essay examines Soviet encounters with India in the 1950s and 1960s, tracing the effects of such encounters on both nations. Using Soviet and Indian published as well as archival material, it pays special attention to the effects on Soviet and Indian economic ideas. Of particular interest is the emergence, in Soviet scholarly and foreign-policy discussions, of the “noncapitalist path” to socialism. This category owed much to the encounters of Soviet experts like M. I. Rubinshtein with India in the mid-1950s. The emergence of a concept of the noncapitalist path, in turn, underwrote the Soviet approach to a variety of underdeveloped nations in the 1950s and 1960s — as promoted vigorously by Nikita Khrushchev and apparatchiks in the Soviet Central Committee.