Numerous accounts have been written about Turkish writer Nâzim Hikmet’s dramatic escape to the Soviet Union in 1951. However, relatively little is known about Nâzim’s life after he fled Turkey—for example, in Kemal Sülker’s 1500-page opus Nâzim Hikmet’in Gerçek Yasami, just 9 pages are devoted to Nâzim’s life between 1951 and his death in 1963. Despite the fact that literally dozens of biographies have been written about Nâzim, none of these works have systematically employed the abundant documentary source material available in Moscow. Drawing upon Russian and Turkish-language documents from the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI) and the Russian State Archive for Literature and Art (RGALI), this talk examines the Soviet political context that Nâzim encountered upon arriving in the USSR in June of 1951. Because Nâzim’s communist views had brought him more than fifteen years in Turkish prisons, his biographers tend to assume that his party credentials in 1951 were “impeccable.” In fact, throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Nâz?m’s Turkish Communist Party (TKP) and Comintern files were riddled with depictions of Nâz?m as a “Turkish spy,” “police agent,” and even a “Trotskyite.” This is because of Nâzim’s role in an apparent effort –involving at least a couple dozen individuals—to gain control over the party organization following mass arrests in 1927 that decimated the TKP leadership. Moreover, Nâzim had unwittingly crossed into the USSR at a time of heightened suspicion in Moscow toward sudden arrivals. Several Turks who had similarly arrived unexpectedly in the 1940s had, by 1951, just recently been tried for espionage and sent to Soviet labor camps. Nâz?m’s old friend and comrade Ismail Bilen, who as the de facto head of the TKP in the USSR would become Nâzim’s political collaborator and mentor in the months following Nâzim’s arrival in Moscow, had himself been the subject of secret police investigation just two years earlier. Nâzim and others from his generation had led international lives in the 1920s, then found themselves targeted--in both Turkey and the USSR--for their border-crossing backgrounds in the 1930s. By the early 1950s, these individuals—facing the Iron Curtain—had to choose one side of the border of the other. Nâzim’s dramatic story of flight and exile was not, in fact, so unique, as many Turkish communists of his generation faced a similar fate.