In 1932, the cash-starved Soviet government shocked many foreign observers by offering an eight-million dollar loan to non-Communist Turkey. Ankara inspired similar incredulity when it accepted; the Turkish government had repeatedly expressed reservations about the political risks of accepting foreign financial aid and few expected that the Soviet Union would be chosen as the low-risk alternative. In their attempts to make sense of this episode, historians have invoked “pragmatism” and “sheer necessity” of national considerations, with the implication that international economic negotiations did not reflect ideas or ideologies that were transnational in scope. Even the most pragmatic of politicians, however, settles upon decisions from among options whose range is defined by an intellectual, and often ideological, appraisal of politics. My hypothesis is that Soviet-Turkish cooperation in 1932-3 should be understood as the product of a shared fear of Western political and economic power, a fear whose breadth and nature reveals a transnational phenomenon. Indeed, the loan was not an isolated event but part of a series of interactions whose character sheds light on a set of ideas that drove both Soviet and Turkish politics. The loan was agreed upon and its conditions negotiated during two demonstrative visits: Ismet Pasha and a large delegation traveled from Ankara to Moscow in 1932 and Kliment Voroshilov journeyed with an equivalent entourage in the opposite direction in 1933. The visits coincided with the Soviet celebration of the First of May and the Turkish tenth anniversary of the Republic, and as such were marked by many public events and celebrations. The visits also provided the opportunity for academic and artistic exchanges, among whose products was a film that resulted from Soviet-Turkish collaboration. When Ismet and Voroshilov spoke of economic cooperation, they spoke of it as a challenge to the West. I look at this language and its origins, and trace its reflections in pageantry and film. The nature of history prevents us from knowing to what extent the Soviet and Turkish politicians believed in the anti-Westernism that they proclaimed when they announced the loan. Yet by taking their words seriously, I hope to show that anti-Western ideas were thought to hold, and indeed did achieve, depth and resonance across broad sections of both Soviet and Turkish societies.