In September of 1959, Nikita Khrushchev made his Hollywood debut. The Soviet premier had arrived in the United States for a twelve-day tour at the invitation of President Eisenhower. During his stay, Khrushchev visited a meatpacking plant in Des Moines where he tasted a hot dog (and by all appearances, loved it). In San Jose, he toured IBM, but was apparently more impressed by the cafeteria than the computers. The visit to Los Angeles was at Khrushchev’s request. His children wanted to see Disneyland.

TO SEE PARIS AND DIE: THE SOVIET LIVES OF WESTERN CULTURE by Eleonory Gilburd Harvard University Press, 480 pp., $35.00

But Khrushchev’s visit to Hollywood quickly went off script. Spyros Skouras, the president of Twentieth Century Fox, used the trip to advertise the studio’s upcoming musical Can-Can. The Soviet leader was taken to the set and posed for photos with Shirley MacLaine, who greeted him in Russian. A luncheon had been organized for the occasion, and all of Hollywood was desperate to get a peek at Khrushchev (though some, notably then-Screen Actors Guild president Ronald Reagan, declined the invite). In the waning years of the blacklist, a picture with a communist leader had all the allure of scandal without any actual repercussions. Elizabeth Taylor, Eddie Fisher (and Fisher’s ex-wife Debbie Reynolds) were all in attendance, as were Zsa Zsa Gábor, Frank Sinatra, and most importantly—Marilyn Monroe. Monroe, who at first was reluctant to come, changed her mind when the studio bosses told her that in Soviet Russia, America meant two things: “Coca-Cola and Marilyn Monroe.”

Khrushchev tolerated the media circus, but a last-minute change to his itinerary brought out his famous temper. When he went up to the podium to address the glitzy audience, he was furious. He had just been told that the trip to Disneyland was called off for safety reasons. His disappointment was visceral. “Is there an epidemic of cholera there or something?” he fumed, angrily gesticulating as the biggest movie stars on earth looked on, awkwardly, afraid he’d threaten to bury them again.

I thought of this anecdote, and Khrushchev’s giddy, almost childlike delight at the prospect of seeing Mickey Mouse when reading To See Paris and Die: The Soviet Lives of Western Culture by historian Eleonory Gilburd. Gilburd’s book focuses on a period in Soviet history known as “the Thaw” or “Khrushchev’s Thaw,” when censorship in the Soviet Union relaxed and Cold War tensions abroad started to ease. The term gets its name from Ilya Ehrenburg’s 1954 novel The Thaw, which broke with the tenets of Socialist Realism (the country’s official artistic policy) and openly condemned Stalin’s Purges. Khrushchev’s policy of “peaceful cooperation” with foreign powers also meant a sudden and large-scale influx of Western art, from Italian neorealist films to J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, into the Soviet Union.

To See Paris and Die tells us what happened to those Western books, films, and paintings behind the Iron Curtain—how they took on new, sometimes unexpected interpretations. For young people, she argues, reading foreign literature wasn’t necessarily about aligning themselves with the West, but was part of defining themselves as a post-Stalin generation, who belonged to a new, more open era. In this sense, To See Paris and Die is, at its core, a well-researched historical study of the process of distortion. By tracing the Soviet afterlives of Western art, Gilburd gestures toward a larger narrative, one that lays bare the processes by which we create myths about other parts of the world in order to understand our place within it.