Mauritius-Russia: the forgotten images of a common history

From Soviet ships to Mauritian students in Moscow, an exhibition reveals little-known images of half a century of links between Mauritius and Russia, beyond official relations.

A dusty road between Mahébourg and Curepipe in 1968. Soviet sailors posing in front of the monument to Vladimir Lenin in Port-Louis. African, Asian and European students gathered in Moscow around the Russian language. A Mauritian textile factory in full operation in the 1980s. These photographs, several decades old, tell a little-known story: that of the links forged between Mauritius and Russia for more than half a century.

Presented on Friday June 12, 2026 at the Hennessy Park Hotel in Ébène, on the occasion of the National Day of the Russian Federation, a photographic exhibition immersed guests in the archives of this bilateral relationship, since the first years following the independence of Mauritius.

Through around twenty photos, the exhibition retraces a time when relations between Port-Louis and Moscow developed in the particular context of the Cold War. In 1973, Prime Minister Seewoosagur Ramgoolam met Alexei Kosygin in Moscow, then President of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union, as part of Mauritius' efforts to diversify its international partnerships.

But these archives also tell a human story. They show Mauritian students who went to train in the Soviet Union, like Ramjutun Uday, who in 1979 participated in a Russian language Olympiad intended for foreign students. They also bear witness to scientific and maritime exchanges, notably with the presence of Soviet ships in the port of Port-Louis in the early 1970s.

Certain images recall the moments when this cooperation took on a more concrete dimension. After the devastating passage of Cyclone Gervaise, the Soviet ship Sergei Lazo joined Mauritius to participate in relief operations, transporting equipment and providing aid to the affected regions.

Other photographs simply tell the daily life of an island in transformation: a knitting factory in Port Louis in 1985, a harvest festival in 1977, or even children at Fort Adelaide in 1979, so many scenes which place this diplomatic history in the social and economic reality of Mauritius.

More than diplomatic archives, these photos are fragments of an era when international relations were also told through ships, students, natural disasters and human encounters.

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