The book by art historian Katarina Lopatkina describes and partly reconstructs the system of Soviet international artistic contacts of the 1920s–1950s, demonstrating a wide range of multidirectional forces that came into play every time “alien” elements of Western culture penetrated the field of Soviet culture. Based on archival materials, the study, for the first time in Russian historiography, examines in detail a number of typological subjects of existence (exchange, creation of a specialized space, exhibition, gift) of Western modernist art in the space of the socialist realist canon.