Soviet translation was not, as the old cliché would have it, simply a ‘window on the West’; it did not present to the Soviet reader an uninterrupted view onto foreign lands but, controlled by censorship, sought to present a suitable, ideologically-correct version of the West to readers. The constant pressure of censorship meant that translation functioned more like a fairground mirror, warping and distorting the picture, bending it to meet the norms of Soviet literary culture. This study has shown that translated literature presented a particular challenge to the Soviet authorities. While an engagement with foreign works was an important factor in Soviet intercultural relations, signalling to foreign rivals that the socialist state was modern, open and free, the authorities remained paranoid about the potential danger that such texts posed to the ideological education of Soviet citizens by furnishing them with alien, politically suspect or anti-Soviet material. Censorial interventions were governed by this anxiety over the impact of the text on the reader, a primary preoccupation for the literary authorities. Both the import and the translation of foreign literature were therefore subject to censorial control that sought to mitigate these risks, manifested in multiple ways. The evidence from the texts and archival documents from Internatsional'naia literatura and Inostrannaia literatura demonstrates that in the censorship of translation, it is not accurate to conceive of censorship simply as an imposed, external force to which actors were either wholly subject or completely resistant. Censorial agents did not act only to implement the interests of the state, and the wishes of the authorities were not unthinkingly applied. On the contrary, negotiation was one of the defining features of the censorship process: editors negotiated with the Party and its officials; translators liaised with editors and authors and censorial actions were often highly tactical. Thus it is necessary to reconsider our definition of censorship, which comes to appear not only as an oppressive application of power, but a blend of relations and practices which coincided in a particular moment and which existed on a spectrum from external state control at one end to internalised, unconscious action on the other.