Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the nineteenth century’s best-selling novel worldwide; only the Bible outsold it. It was known not only as a book but through stage productions, films, music, and commercial advertising as well. But how was Stowe’s novel—one of the watershed works of world literature—actually received outside of the American context? True Songs of Freedom explores one vital sphere of Stowe’s influence: Russia and the Soviet Union, from the 1850s to the present day. Due to Russia’s own tradition of rural slavery, the vexed entwining of authoritarianism and political radicalism throughout its history, and (especially after 1945) its prominence as the superpower rival of the United States, Russia developed a special relationship to Stowe’s novel during this period of rapid societal change. Tracking the reception of Uncle Tom’s Cabin across 150 years, the book engages with debates over serf emancipation and peasant education, early Soviet efforts to adapt Stowe’s deeply religious work of protest to an atheistic revolutionary value system, the novel’s exploitation during the years of Stalinist despotism, Cold War anti-Americanism and antiracism, and the postsocialist consumerist ethos.