The 1959 Kitchen Debate
(or, how cultural exchanges changed the Soviet Union)
kitchens in model homes are not normally sites where world leaders debate their differences. Yet that is exactly what happened 50 years ago, on July 24, 1959, when U.S. Vice President Richard M. Nixon and Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev squared off while touring the kitchen of a model American home at the U.S. National Exhibition in Moscow’s Sokolniki Park.
In that “kitchen debate,” as it came to be known, the two leaders vigorously debated not only whether such a well-equipped kitchen – with dishwasher, refrigerator, and range – could be found in the $14,000 home of a typical American worker, but also on the relative merits of their rival political and economic systems. There is no exact record of their remarks, but many Western reporters witnessed the debate, and a reconstructed version was published in The New York Times (July 25, 1959; see russianlife.com for a link).
Neither Nixon nor Khrushchev, moreover, could have foreseen that their verbal sparring would signal not only the start of a series of high-level summit meetings between leaders of their two countries, but also the endorsement of a broad program of cultural and other exchanges, which would lead eventually to profound changes within the Soviet Union.
Nixon had come to Moscow to preside over the opening of a U.S. National Exhibition under the 1958 U.S.-Soviet Cultural Agreement, which provided for national exhibitions in the two countries. A centerpiece of the U.S. exhibition was Buckminster Fuller’s 30,000 square foot geodesic dome, which housed the scientific and technical exhibits, and which the Soviets agreed to purchase at the close of the Moscow exhibition. But the success of the U.S. exhibition was due in large part to the many items provided gratis for display by more than 450 American companies, ranging from consumer products to automobiles, trucks, farm machinery, and other mechanized products of U.S. industry, as well as the 75 young American guides, all fluent in Russian, who were assigned to explain the exhibition’s products to inquisitive Russian visitors. And it was at Sokolniki that Khrushchev got his first taste of Pepsi Cola, dispensed free to all visitors in Dixie cups. Khrushchev and other Russians liked it, giving Pepsi a huge head start in the Soviet market over its rival Coca Cola.
More than three million Soviet citizens attended the six weeks of the exhibition. For Soviet visitors, the U.S. exhibition was a cornucopia of consumer products that had never been seen in the Soviet Union. And for most of the Soviet visitors, it was their first and only opportunity to speak with an American. In the reciprocal exchange, the Soviets mounted their own national exhibition in New York City’s Coliseum. Unlike the U.S. exhibition, which emphasized consumer goods, the Soviet exhibition was strong in machinery, science, and technology.
Nixon had four encounters with Khrushchev during his Moscow visit. The first was the so-called “courtesy call” on Khrushchev in the Kremlin, where Khrushchev defied diplomatic protocol by railing against the Captive Nations Resolution passed by the U.S. Congress one week earlier, and banging his fist on the table for emphasis. The second was in a television studio at the U.S. exhibition where, as William Safire reported in The New York Times (July 27, 1984), “the bellicose Soviet leader verbally mauled the American Vice President, who was trying to be Mr. Nice Guy.” A video tape of that encounter was smuggled out of the Soviet Union and shown on American TV. The third encounter was the so-called “kitchen debate,” where the two leaders traded barbs and debated over the $14,000 model American prefab home, with Nixon defending its kitchen as typical for an American worker’s home, and Khrushchev arguing that the home on exhibit was within the reach of only rich Americans, while Soviet workers had homes with similar modern appliances. The fourth, and most substantive and important meeting, was a five-hour off-the-record debate that took place at Khrushchev’s country dacha, where the two discussed foreign policy issues in a non-bellicose manner, and Nixon repeated President Eisenhower’s invitation to Khrushchev to visit the United States, which Khrushchev did for two weeks in September 1959.
Khrushchev, in remarks delivered at the formal opening of the exhibition, admitted that he had felt a “certain envy” while on his informal tour of the U.S. exhibition that morning, but he added that the Soviets would soon “overtake” Americans in peaceful economic competition, and would wave as they passed them, a pledge the Soviets would continue to emphasize in future years, but were unable to fulfill. Not made public was one of those Soviet jokes (called anekdoty in Russian) that soon began to circulate – that the Soviet Union should not try to overtake the United States, because then Americans would see that Russian behinds were bare.
Nixon, in his formal remarks, read a conciliatory statement from Eisenhower regretting the Cold War, which he termed as “so unnecessary,” and expressed his hope that the exchange of exhibitions would be first step in restoring the trust and unity that the two countries had experienced during World War II. And, in an unprecedented radio and TV address to the Soviet people, broadcast at the end of his visit to the Soviet Union, Nixon called for “sharply expanded exchange programs” between the two countries, an end to jamming of foreign broadcasts, and an exchange of regular radio and TV broadcasts by leaders of the two countries.
As Charlotte Saikowski of The Christian Science Monitor, and one of U.S. National Exhibition’s Russian-speaking guides, has described it:
To those of us who were there, the American National Exhibition in Moscow in 1959 was an exhilarating, demanding, and heart-warming experience. It represented a breakthrough in Soviet-American cultural relations. After six weeks of talking and arguing with thousands of the some three million Soviet citizens who attended, we left Moscow with an indelible feeling that on a human, personal level, Soviets and Americans can communicate and, despite their differing political systems, find something in common.
Nixon concluded his visit with an exhausting 10-day, 5,000 mile tour of the Soviet Union. This was followed by a stop in Warsaw, where he spent three pleasant days focusing on U.S. relations with Poland and other East European communist countries. The visit to Warsaw was not planned, but when the Soviets refused to give Nixon permission to exit the Soviet Union from Siberia on his return trip to Washington, he seized the opportunity to visit a country which in 1956 had replaced a Stalinist regime with one of “national communism,” and was seeking improved relations with the West, and with the United States in particular.
Nixon’s plane landed at a Polish military base outside Warsaw, but his route into the city had been broadcast by Radio Free Europe, and, as his convoy of vehicles approached the city, many thousands of Poles turned out to enthusiastically and warmly greet the U.S. Vice President. As the convoy neared the center of the city, Nixon rose and the crowd began to throw bouquets of flowers. [Aside: I was driving my Ford sedan in the third vehicle of the convoy, as our embassy’s cultural attaché in Warsaw, and I had to stop several times to push aside the bunches of flowers piling up on the hood of my car and obstructing my view.]
The decision to visit Warsaw was also a signal that the United States henceforth would treat each East European communist country individually, depending on its willingness to reform and to expand contacts with the West. It highlighted the centrality of cultural exchanges in U.S. foreign policy.
When U.S. cultural exchange with the Soviet Union is mentioned, most Americans think of dancers, orchestras, and ice shows that came to the U.S., filling halls with admiring spectators. But cultural exchange consisted of much more: the exchange of people. They fall under the rubric of what we now call Public Diplomacy – talking to another country, not through diplomats, but directly to its people, to influence how they regard the United States.
Under Stalin, the Iron Curtain was almost impenetrable. Information about the West was tightly controlled. Foreign travel was limited – only officials, trusted newspaper reporters, and KGB agents were allowed to travel beyond the Soviet Bloc.
But over 30 years (1958-1988), more than 50,000 Soviets came to the United States under the 1958 U.S.-Soviet Cultural Agreement, and many thousands more traveled to Western Europe. They came as scholars and students, scientists and engineers, writers and journalists, government and party leaders, musicians, and athletes. They came, they saw, they were conquered, and the Soviet Union would never again be the same. Those exchanges prepared the way for Gorbachev’s glasnost, perestroika, and the end of the Cold War.
The Cultural Agreement was actually an agreement for long-term exchanges in science and technology, agriculture, medicine and public health, radio and television, motion pictures, exhibitions, publications, government, youth, athletics, scholarly research, culture, and tourism. Why an agreement? What did we hope to accomplish?
An agreement was necessary because the Soviets made it a requirement, although many of the activities covered by the agreement were not the responsibility of the U.S. government. But President Eisenhower wanted exchanges with the Soviets, and his role was very important. He was a national hero, had great prestige, and had been to Moscow after World War II. Eisenhower originally wanted to receive 10,000 Soviet students, pay all their expenses, and not require any reciprocity for American students. FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover concurred, but the State Department, in its negotiations with Moscow, tried for just 100 students, and the Soviets eventually agreed to exchange only 20 a year for each of the first two years. After the Soviets withdrew three of their nominees, only 17 were exchanged in academic year 1958-59.
U.S. objectives, published in National Security Council directive 5607, included the following: to broaden relations by expanding contacts between people and institutions of the two countries; involve the Soviets in joint activities and develop habits of cooperation with the U.S.; end Soviet isolation and inward orientation by giving it a broader view of world and itself; improve U.S. understanding of the USSR through access to its institutions and people; and obtain the benefits of cooperation in culture, education, science and technology.
For most Russians who came to the United States in those years – and most were Russians — their visits were a form of shock therapy. When the first Soviet students were shown a U.S. supermarket, they thought it was a Potemkin village created to impress them. But perhaps the most important impression Soviets brought back from the United States was not amazement at our consumer goods but a redefinition of what is “normal,” a word with special meaning for Russians who want to live in a normal society.
Over the next 30 years, several thousand Soviet graduate students and young scholars studied in the United States, and an equal number of Americans went to the Soviet Union. For the United States, the exchanges created a pool of people knowledgeable about the Soviet Union who, having lived there, were able to distinguish fact from fiction. Most American professors in Russian studies today are alumni of those exchanges.
The Soviets likewise accumulated a growing number of scholars who had seen the West, who recognized how far behind the Soviet Union was, that communism had failed them, and that the Soviet media were not telling the truth. Here it is worth mentioning just one of them: Aleksandr Yakovlev, who studied at Columbia University 1958-59, the first year of the exchanges.
Yakovlev has been described as the architect of glasnost and perestroika, the twin policies of Mikhail Gorbachev to promote “openness” and a “restructuring” of the Soviet Union. His rise from a small peasant village to the Politburo in Moscow and senior adviser to Gorbachev was not unprecedented for an ambitious and bright young Russian. But Yakovlev was different from the run-of-the-mill party official. He read voraciously, had an open mind, and, in addition to his year at Columbia, had served ten years as Soviet ambassador to Canada. That lengthy exposure to the West differentiated Yakovlev from other rising Russian leaders whose backgrounds were more insular.
Yakovlev was one of four Soviet graduate students at Columbia in the fall of 1958. He studied modern American history, in particular the foreign policy of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Greatly affected by his year at Columbia, Yakovlev has described it as more meaningful to him than the 10 years he later spent as Soviet ambassador to Canada. When I asked him what he had gotten from his year at Columbia, Yakovlev said “I spent most of my time in the library, where I read more than 200 books that I could not have read in THE Soviet Union.”
Yakovlev later earned a reputation as the protector of the Soviet liberal intelligentsia that emerged during Gorbachev’s reforms. And, as a foreign policy adviser, he was at Gorbachev’s side during each of the Soviet leader’s five summit meetings with President Reagan.
To reach the mass audience, the Cultural Agreement also provided for the exchange of motion pictures. During the years of the agreement, four or five U.S. films were purchased by the Soviets each year. Most were pure entertainment – comedies, adventure stories, musicals, and science fiction – which met the interests of Soviet audiences. Among the more popular over the years were Some Like it Hot, The Apartment, and Tootsie. Although the number of purchased films was small, hundreds of copies were made for distribution to cinemas throughout the Soviet Union. Other American films, although not purchased by the Soviets, were clandestinely copied and screened at “members-only” showings in professional clubs of Soviet writers, scientists, architects, journalists, cinematographers, and other privileged persons.
From foreign films, Soviet audiences learned that people in the West did not have to stand in long lines to purchase food, did not live in communal apartments, dressed fashionably, enjoyed many conveniences not available in the USSR, owned cars, and lived the normal life so sought by Russians. Audiences were not listening to the sound track or reading subtitles, but watching the doings of people in the films – in their homes, on the streets, the clothes they wore, the cars they drove. And when refrigerators were opened in Western films, they were always full of food. Such details of how people lived in the West were very revealing for Soviet audiences.
Meanwhile, Soviet performing artists – symphony orchestras, ballet troupes, individual artists, as well as circuses and ice shows – were good box office attractions in the United States, and big dollar earners for the Soviet state. In exchange, the State Department sent major symphony orchestras, jazz bands, dance ensembles, and even once a circus.
Sending a performing arts group needed the approval of both parties to the agreement. The United States exercised its veto several times when the State Department, fearing protests by émigré groups after the Soviet suppression of the 1956 Hungarian revolution, said that it would not grant visas for tours by the Soviet Army Chorus. Goskontsert, the Soviet state concert agency, reflecting the conservatism of Russian officials and ideologists, rejected many of the modern dance groups and jazz ensembles proposed by the State Department as “too avant garde.” And, until the late 1980s, rock music was out of the question.
An old Russian proverb has it that, “It is better to see once than hear a hundred times,” and Russians heeded that advice in flocking to see the 23 thematic exhibitions produced by U.S. Information Agency under the 1958 Cultural Agreement. What they had heard a hundred times about the United States from their own media was negated by a single visit to one of the USIA touring exhibitions, which gave them a glimpse of the United States and its people. The U.S. exhibitions, like the 1959 National Exhibition, drew huge crowds, with lines stretching for blocks awaiting admittance, and were seen, on average, by some 250,000 visitors in each city. All told, more than 20 million Soviet citizens visited the 23 U.S. exhibitions over a 30-year period.
Many of the American guides would go on to make careers in the Soviet area as scholars, professors, diplomats, and journalists. With their first-hand knowledge of life in the Soviet provinces, they became a national asset during the years when U.S. knowledge of the Soviet Union was minimal.*
The more than 50,000 Soviets who came to United States over the 30-year period of the Cultural Agreement, plus the tens of thousands who came to Western Europe during those years, prepared the way for Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika, and the end of Cold War. Equally important, the exchanges prepared the way for agreements with the Soviet Union on arms control and other important issues, as the Soviets learned that they could accept more Americans on their territory without risk to their national security.
It is fascinating to consider that it all traces back to a makeshift kitchen. RL
SIXTH COLUMN: Another US government-funded effort to tell the American story to Soviets was Amerika magazine, the counterpart to Soviet Life, this magazine’s predecessor. According to David S. Fogelsong (The American Mission and the ‘Evil Empire’, Cambridge, 2007), the Soviet Defense Ministry sought to ban the magazine’s circulation was in “sensitive” Soviet cities.
For more on the 1959 U.S. National Exhibition, see Walter L. Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 1945-1961, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997, from which Richmond has in part drawn for this article.
*ILLUSTRIOUS ALUMS: Many former guides went on to prominent and influential roles in business, academia and government, including as U.S. ambassadors to the states of the former USSR. For more info, see the links for this issue on russianlife.com
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