Raj Kapoor, as the anecdote emphasizes, was a revered star in the Soviet Union when a newly independent India was trying to establish itself as a non-aligned nation in the context of the Cold War. His film Awāra (The Vagabond, 1951) was an unexpected hit that endeared Soviet viewers to Indian cinema. Concurrently, the Soviets appreciated a few other major stars such as Dev Anand and Dilip Kumar, whose films Rahi (The Wayfarer, 1952, dir. Khwaja Ahmad Abbas) and Naya Daur (The New Era, 1957, dir. B. R. Chopra) also got Soviet releases. This chapter traces the history of Indian Hindi cinema’s industrial exchange and globalization, from the 1950s to the 1980s, spanning the decades of the Cold War up to the beginnings of perestroika in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, commonly referred to as the Soviet Union. In recounting this history, it focuses on crucial star nodes and their nodal power within Indian Hindi cinema’s formative industrial structure after independence. While recounting this history of star switching power, this chapter also situates how stars came to be Hindi cinema’s global anchors with the most industrial power, when, during the late 1940s and early 1950s, the studio system that existed under British rule broke down. Indian Hindi cinema’s post-independence industrial structure, we will see, was marked by significant transformations. The studios were replaced by a new structural formation wherein small independent film clusters dominated the production landscape.