This article examines the emergence of the Soviet regulation of foreign travel in a specific context: the space in which Soviet international aspirations overlapped and interacted with Party–intelligentsia relations at home. The discussion ties together two major, international aspects of Party–intelligentsia relations. The first is a detailed discussion of the regulation of foreign travel, exploring the manner in which access to the outside world in the early Soviet years was, like other scarce or highly sought-after resources, subject to bureaucratic monopolisation and, as a result, became not only subject to party-state regulatory agendas but also a prime staple of patronage transactions. The second is an examination of how the emergence of Soviet cultural diplomacy in the 1920s began to influence Soviet domestic interactions with the non-party intelligentsia. Specifically, the article examines the particular way in which the intelligentsia was enlisted in foreign cultural relations by the All-Union Society for Cultural Ties Abroad (VOKS). The article shows the policies and attitudes behind the creation of VOKS as an ostensibly non-governmental association and dissects the many aspects of its intricate engagement with the non-Party, intellectual public known by the Russian term obshchestvennost'. The analysis suggests that the widespread assumption that personal and bureaucratic relations are dichotomous or fully separable ignores the way in which institutional agendas and personal connections were routinely intertwined in Soviet patronage. Furthermore, key stages in the Soviet handling of the intelligentsia's access to international contacts, from the New Economic Policy to Stalin's ‘Great Break’ to the Great Purges, were fundamentally shaped by the intense ideological and cultural significance invested in the foreign cultural resources as they were transformed from prized assets to fatal sources of contagion.