How did banned manuscripts find their way from behind the Iron Curtain abroad, how were they published and read in exile, and what did the authors themselves know and think about this? Yakov Klotz's book examines the first Western publications and international reception of texts about the Gulag and Stalinism from the 1950s to the 1980s. Tamizdat—as a literary practice and political institution during the Cold War—represented an alternative field of cultural production, opposed to the Soviet regime and the dogmas of socialist realism, but not without its own hierarchy, ideology, and even censorship. The narrative centers on the history of literary connections established, despite the Iron Curtain, between publishers, critics, readers in the West, and authors in the USSR. Yakov Klotz is a philologist and Slavist who teaches Russian literature at Hunter College, City University of New York.