My paper will explore the problems of drawing cultural boundaries of the USSR at the height of Cold War tensions. In particular, I focus on Tajik and Iranian claims on legacies of Persian classical literature. These competing claims complicated the definition of an ideological divide that cut across culturally, linguistically, and historically linked regions during a period when Soviet cultural strategy abroad favored international exchange. Using archival documents from the Russian State Archive of Contemporary History, I focus on the period of escalating tensions following the Mossadeq coup in the mid-1950s, when Soviet attempts to increase their cultural presence in Tehran through the Soviet Cultural Center, its literary magazine, and film-screenings were met with increased resistance and outright attacks by Iranian state authorities. Inside the Soviet Union, such international tensions lent gravity to disputes over the status of Persian cultural heritage taking place the highest levels. The 1954 Iranian publication of a fraudulent biography of Iranian leftist poet Abulqasim Lahuti – who fled from Iran to the USSR in 1922 and acquired the status of “Tajik National Writer” – triggered a high-level investigation into the status over Persian literary legacy. Lahuti used his denunciation of the autobiography before the Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov, the Second Secretary of the TsK Mikhail Andreyevich Suslov, and First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev as an opportunity to air his problems with the Tajik Orientalist and First Secretary of the Tajik TsK Bobojon Ghafurov. According to Lahuti, Ghafurov insisted that classical Persian literary figures like Firdowsi and Omar Khayyam were the exclusive inheritance of Tajik population, and Lahuti’s disagreement with the First Secretary led to the censorship of the poet, and other problems for him inside Tajikistan. Lahuti’s status and experience in the Communist International and his language of international solidarity helped the Central Committee decide in his favor and led to an official reprimand of Ghafurov, implying that internationalist dimensions of Soviet cultural politics with Iran, which emphasized aspects of their shared past. Iranian nationalists also made claims to literary figures from across the Persian-speaking world in the 1950s. Using Iranian press, Persian-language biographies of Lahuti, and other literary publications I will explore Iranian perceptions of Lahuti, an Iranian-leftist-internationalist reinvented as Soviet-Tajik-national hero, and compare Iranian nationalist claims on Persian literary classics with Tajik ones as a way of exploring differences between the two forms of nationalism.