In 1965 the Soviet leadership instructed the Academy of Science and it’s affiliates in the Central Asia to “study the experience” of Central Asia’s development, in order to produce lessons that could be applied in the Third World. This made sense, since the post-1953 development of Soviet Central Asia was motivated in part by the desire to make it a model for post-colonial states. And there were indeed some interesting similarities, if not the ones the Soviet leadership had intended to make: the tendency to pick development projects based on local elites' political considerations rather than economic necessity, the focus on big projects, the reliance on “outside” skilled labor, and so forth. Drawing on sources from Russia and Tajikistan, this paper will examine how Soviet planners working abroad understood the successes and failures of Soviet policy in Central Asia and to what extent they actually applied these lessons when they went to provide aid abroad. The first half of the paper will focus on Soviet aid to Afghanistan, investigating whether or not these aid plans incorporated lessons learned from the Central Asian experience. The second half will explore how Tajik specialists came to represent these programs abroad, what sort of knowledge informed their work, and what lessons they may have brought home from these experiences.