Amerika, a monthly magazine developed by the State Department and released in Russian in the Soviet Union between 1945 and 1952 and then from 1956, remains an unknown vector of the US public diplomacy toward the USSR. By consulting the archives of Amerika for the years 1945-1952 and reading all the published issues, this article explores the pivotal historical period marking the transition from the Grand Alliance to the Cold War. From this point of view, Amerika offers an interesting prism of analysis since it was freely circulating in the USSR until winter 1949-1950, as the Cold War was in full swing in 1947, before finally being suspended by the State Department in the summer of 1952. This article first focuses on the conception of the monthly, a joint effort between the Magazine Branch of the State Department and the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. It then looks at the two main challenges that the editors had to face. On the one hand, they had to target precisely the aspirations and tastes of the Russian readership, perceived as difficult, even hostile, and therefore far from being acquired to the American cause. In this sense the study of the journal turns out to be very indicative of the American representations of Soviet reality. On the other hand, it had to ask what aspects of the American civilization should be selected to convince the Soviets of the excellence of the “American way of life”?