Before the post-WWII watershed of decolonization, the Soviet-led translation system stood alone as a systematic, reciprocal attempt to establish a canon of world literature in which “world” did not practically coincide with “Europe.” Persian played an integrating role in this system second only to Russian, as a prestige language of world classics, the language of a Soviet nationality (Tajik), a common second language among Soviet Eastern nationalities, and a bridge between the Soviet and international East. The result was a fundamental transformation of the relationship between the Persian literary classics and their readership across the Persianate world and beyond. This essay introduces the network of intellectuals responsible for this transition: Soviet Eastern writers and bureaucrats, Russian and foreign leftist orientalists, Russian poet-translators, and anticolonial writers and scholars across West and South Asia. It then surveys the forms and venues whose skopoi and production conditions informed the varied styles of Soviet and second-world translations of Persian classics: Russian, Azerbaijani, and Uzbek scholarly annotation-translations, prestige editions of literary translations from interlinear ponies, school textbooks, etc. Finally, it briefly situates Persian classics translations in relation to second-world translations of modern Persian/Tajik poetry, and literary translations to Tajik/Persian.