My paper aims at studying the role which Western knowledge played in the Soviet Union during the Cold War despite the iron curtain. I consider the period of 1953 – 1964 which was the time of so called industrial modernization initiated by the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. The aim of modernization was to increase production, renew facilities and provide positive changes in outdated industries. This task, however, was very complicated to be completed in the post-war country because of lack of specialists and produced facilities. This forced the leadership to apply for the Western help under the idea of so called peaceful co-existence. This idea had to provide possibilities for studying and purchasing Western technologies via official trips by Soviet specialists to Finland, West Germany and other countries. I emphasize technology transfer into the pulp and paper industry which was significant but backward branch of the Soviet economy. I aim at studying the local level, i.e. seeing how the achievements of the government were introduced into a certain factory. That is why I focus on a case of Svetogorsk pulp and paper plant which was a former Finnish factory annexed by the Soviet Union after the Soviet-Finnish war of 1941 – 1944. I study how Western technologies were brought to a “former” capitalist enterprise and pay a specific attention to ways knowledge was transferred and used. I focus on ways Soviet specialists got technical knowledge and obtained particular skills being abroad on their business trips and implemented them in the Soviet Union later. On the one hand, I am interested in what technologies were transferred and implemented successfully and what role these technologies played in the Khrushchev`s modernization. On the other hand, I am analyzing reasons of technology transfer failures. I consider technologies and specialists, i.e. technological and social factors as mutually influenced each other, following Thomas Hughes, who emphasized an importance of social component of socio-technological systems for technological development. This allows to study how knowledge changed while being transferred? How did Soviet specialists deal with Western knowledge? And in general, was the Soviet Union capable to employ and adapt transferred technologies?