This chapter argues that from late Stalinism to the Khrushchev Thaw (1941–1964), Eastern poets and orientalist translators inflected multinational and international translation with a distinctively Persianate ethics of love and hospitality. The chapter develops an account of a mid-century internationalist sentimentality grounded in translation, which prefigures subsequent attempts in feminist theory to reconfigure the patriarchal idea of translation as possessive love into a more receptive model of translation. The opening section challenges the established Soviet and Russian studies narrative in which multinational literature is said to have been invented in Russian translation, showing Eastern poets’ active involvement in programming their own reception. A series of case studies follow. One section considers the collaborations of Uzbek and Russian poets on bilingual poems of hospitality for the Jewish refugees flooding Tashkent during the Second World War. Another shows how the embedded sonnets of Romeo and Juliet were brought into the ghazal mode in Tajik translation. Another shows how the Turkish poet Nazım Hikmet’s theater adaptation of the classical romance Farhad and Shirin sparked Thaw literature debates in Russian and Turkic translations. Poets discussed include Ghafur Ghulam, Anna Akhmatova, Konstantin Simonov, and Zhala Isfahani.

After Tashkent’s fall General M. G. Chernyaev became the first governor of the new province of Turkestan, and immediately began lobbying to keep the city under Russian rule and to embark on further conquests. An apparent threat from Sayyid Muzaffar, Amir of Bukhara, provided him with a justification for further military action, but he retreated before the fortified town of Jizzakh and was recalled shortly afterwards. His successor, General D. I. Romanovskii, defeated the Bukharan forces at the Battle of Irjar, and then launched unauthorised assaults on Khujand and Jizzakh, adding further to Russian territory. After a brief lull, during which Turkestan was made a Governor-Generalship under General K. P. von Kaufman, war with Bukhara broke out again in 1868. Von Kaufman’s forces defeated Amir Sayyid Muzaffar’s army at Chupan-Ata, outside Samarkand, and at the Zirabulak heights. After the Russian garrison in the Samarkand fortress had been besieged and relieved, the whole of the upper Zarafshan valley was annexed to Russia and the Bukharan Emirate’s remaining territory became a Russian protectorate. Von Kaufman realised that in order to have a stable relationship with Bukhara he would need to strengthen the Amir’s authority, which he did by crushing the independent city-state of Shahrisabz and handing it over to Bukharan rule.