The year was 1983. Film director Babbar Subhash’s ‘Disco Dancer’ had just been invited for the Moscow film festival by a Mumbai-based agency Sovex Fort. “I was hesitant because it was a modern film with modern music and mostly dark films such as ‘Do Bigha Zamin’ have been successful in Russia but Smita Patil convinced me otherwise,” Subhash recalls.

By the time the movie screening ended, over 3,000 people in the auditorium were clapping and dancing along to the title track. “It was one of the best days of my life,” he says. ‘Disco Dancer’ went on to sell 120 million tickets in the Soviet Union, and even WhatsApp’s Ukrainian cofounder Jan Koum recalls watching the film as many as 20 times as a kid in Kyiv.

With Hollywood movies banned in the USSR during the Cold War, the Soviet government began promoting Indian movies from the 1950s onwards. The first big hit was Raj Kapoor’s ‘Awara’ selling 64 million tickets followed by ‘Shree 420’. Then came movies such as ‘Dhool Ka Phool’, ‘Love In Simla’, ‘Bobby’, ‘Barood’, ‘Seeta Aur Geeta’, ‘Muqaddar Ka Sikandar’.

Dr Sudha Rajagopalan, senior lecturer in East European Studies at the University of Amsterdam, estimates that 210 Indian films were screened in Soviet theatres between 1954 and 1991, around 190 of which were mainstream Hindi films from Bombay. “Indian popular films often surpassed both domestic and other foreign cinema in viewer turnout,” she writes in her book.

Elena Doroshenko, a Moscow-based journalist and linguist who has watched the old hits as well as the relatively newer ‘Kal Ho Naa Ho’ and ‘Paheli’, says they struck an emotional chord with Russians. “The films spoke the same emotional language — even though we were different, we understood the emotions and passions,” she says.

The success of Hindi films in the USSR also led to joint productions such as ‘Alibaba Aur 40 Chor’ and ‘Sohni Mahiwal’. However, this changed after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. “There was a flood of various films from the West and we wanted to imitate that lifestyle,” Doroshenko says. “Indian films were still on TV — it’s not that they were forgotten but they stopped being a sensation.”

Dancer Svetlana Tulasi, who was born to an Indian dad and Russian mom and raised in Moscow, recalls watching Bollywood movies on cassette tapes, then cable TV, then DVDs and eventually on the internet. She shot to fame a few years ago with her viral Bollywood-Kathak fusion dances at Russia's Got Talent and Ukraine's Got Talent.

On YouTube, there are Russian fan channels devoted to Mithun Chakraborty, and dance performances set to the song ‘Jimmy Jimmy’. There are even a couple of restaurants by that name in Vladivostok and the Georgian capital of Tbilisi.

The Georgian ‘Jimmy Jimmy’ was inaugurated in 2019 by none other than Raj Kapoor’s son Rajeev Kapoor. “When we visited Georgia for the first time, we were surprised to see that taxi drivers were playing ‘Jimmy Jimmy’ and ‘Mera Joota hai Japani’,” says owner Shubham Joshi whose customer base includes both locals as well as Indian students.