The article, written on the basis of documents from Russian archives, shows how the image of Romania in the perception of Soviet writers who traveled there on creative trips changed in accordance with the changes in Soviet-Romanian relations. As follows from the reports, the majority of Soviet writers who came to any country (including Romania) perceived what they saw through the prism of the official Soviet ideology and established stereotypes about the superiority of the Soviet experience of socialist construction. In the 1950s, while Soviet-Romanian official relations were relatively painless, Romania did not give Soviet writers grounds for serious concerns about its deviation from Soviet models. This follows from the report of the chief of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the USSR Writers Union Boris Polevoy who visited Romania in 1959. But 5 years later the situation changed and in 1964 Savva Dangulov (who served in Romania as diplomat in 1940s and new Romanian well enough) saw the new trends in the Romanian internal policy. The question of the value of writers’ reports on the results of their trips abroad, in particular to the socialist countries, as historical source is actual. Undoubtedly, their authors were often in captivity of dominant ideological stereotypes and, moreover, in order to avoid discontent, quite often they wrote exactly what was expected to be heard by higher authorities. The dominance of ideological stereotypes about the superiority of Soviet experience formed a «surveillance strategy», implying a prejudiced approach to what was seen, it created a certain filter that distorted the perceived picture, but even in this case an attentive, interested, knowledgeable cultural environment could notice significant trends. Thus, with all the inevitability of distortions in the reports of writers, it is a source that can be taken into account among others when trying to reconstruct the public moods in a particular country in this or that historical period. Especially when (as in the case of the report of Savva Dangulov on the results of his trip to Romania in 1964), the researcher deals with the notes of the person who knew well the host country.