How do we explain the influx of Western culture to the Soviet Union? Clem Cecil talks with Eleonory Gilburd, author of ‘To See Paris and Die: The Soviet Lives of Western Culture’. The Soviet Union was a notoriously closed society until Stalin's death in 1953. Then, in the mid-1950s, a torrent of Western novels, films, and paintings invaded Soviet streets and homes, acquiring heightened emotional significance.