Nixon Visits Moscow

On May 22, 1972, Air Force One landed in Moscow for the first time. The landing was broadcast live on Soviet television. Huddled around their TV screens, Soviets tried to guess who would exit the plane first – Nixon or Kissinger? As it turned out, it was Mrs. Nixon who first appeared at the door, her husband having very naturally let her go first.

This was the last thing Soviet television viewers expected. The wives of Soviet leaders did occasionally travel with their husbands, but both Khrushchev’s and Brezhnev’s wives were pretty much kept out of view. Perhaps this was because they weren’t much to look at, or perhaps their husbands simply saw no reason for them to make public appearances.

Such was the beginning of this historic visit, the first by a sitting American president to the Soviet Union.* It was also the first time Soviet television viewers saw an American president in a live broadcast. In past decades, this would have been unthinkable.

After the Revolution, America was portrayed in the Soviet Union exclusively as a country of fat capitalists using thousand dollar bills to light their cigars. It was the land of the Wild West, of asphalt jungles, a land where the unemployed died of hunger and blacks lived in terror of lynch mobs. A brief change of attitude during the Second World War – when everyone appreciated the American Studebaker trucks and Spam that came with Lend-Lease, and American and Soviet soldiers shook hands when they met at the Elbe – was soon followed by the fall of the Iron Curtain and the transformation of America from ally to bitter foe.

Our newspapers were filled with shocking stories about Americans destroying Soviet crops by releasing Colorado potato beetles (see Russian Life, July/August 2007) onto the fields of collective farms and caricatures of Uncle Sam, who was always shown threatening or robbing someone, or holding a knife to the neck of some oppressed people. In the late forties and fifties, the popular publications Ogonyok (“Little Flame”) and Krokodil (“Crocodile”) entertained readers with knee slappers like the following:

President Eisenhower arrives in Paris. West German Chancellor Adenauer visits the city at the same time. The cries of French workers reach Eisenhower’s ears “...ower! Go home!” “They must be yelling at Adenauer!” he thinks to himself.

Meanwhile, Adenauer is entering the city from the opposite direction and decides that the cries must be directed at Eisenhower.

There was also a little ditty about Truman that gained popularity: «А Гарри и гориллы найдут себе могилы, кто ищет тот всегда найдёт». The rhyme and alliteration are lost in translation, but the song basically says, “Harry and the gorillas will find themselves graves, he who seeks shall always find.” Just what gorillas are being referred to here is not clear. Probably in the minds of the ditty’s composers, Truman was always surrounded by some hulking thugs, gorillas, or maybe it was really “garrillas” to go with “Garry” (Truman’s first name in Russian, since, the language lacks an H). Whatever the logic, it is now lost to posterity.

Then came the Khrushchev era. In 1959, Nikita Sergeyevich famously paid a visit to President Kennedy in the United States. (See story, page 52) Khrushchev, like any Soviet would have been, was stunned and a bit taken aback by the bounty of American stores. However, he was constitutionally incapable of contemplating the possibility that there just might be something about the American political or economic system that was superior to the Soviet system. Instead, he concluded that if we just rolled up our sleeves and put in a little more effort, we could surpass America. (Soviet jokesters reacted immediately: “My friends, we’ll outstrip the USA in the production of meat and milk, and then, my friends, we’ll outstrip the USA in the consumption of vodka and cognac.”)

It was at this very moment, when the USSR was trying with all its might to “catch up with and outstrip America,” that Richard Nixon first visited the Soviet Union. That was back in 1959, when he was “only” vice president. The fact that he was just the No. 2 man in America did not stop Khrushchev from picking a fight with him at the American National Exhibition in Sokolniki and belittling the replica of a typical American kitchen on display. This kitchen featured technological innovations beyond the wildest dreams of the Soviet housewife. Khrushchev, however, claimed that Soviet homes had washing machines just as good as the American models and that the Soviet people could buy the same sorts of houses Americans lived in. (See Russian Life, July/August 2009.)

When now-President Nixon set down on the tarmac in 1972, thirteen years had passed since the Kitchen Debate. Khrushchev had long since been forced into retirement by his fellow Soviet leaders, and Nixon, as America’s No. 1, had come to Moscow to conclude the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT), as well as a number of other cooperation agreements. The man who 13 years before had been labeled the world’s most notorious vilifier of the Soviet Union, was now almost a friend. Two years later, when the Watergate break-in began making headlines, some in the USSR even claimed that the scandal had been fabricated by anti-Soviet factions within the American government that wanted to get back at the president for making friends with Communists.

In 1972, it looked as if Soviet-American friendship was in full bloom. Brezhnev, an avid collector of automobiles, was enamored of Nixon’s Lincoln Continental. A few months later, during a visit to Camp David, the General Secretary was given a Lincoln of his own as an official gift and proceeded to take Nixon on such a joy ride that the president almost hit his head on the windshield.*

In Moscow, Nixon was received with unprecedented fanfare and respect such that the historic significance of this visit was clear to everyone, from top officials to ordinary citizens. When a reception in Nixon’s honor was held at Spaso House, the residence of the American ambassador, a secret police agent was put into every apartment on the quiet Arbat street where the ambassadorial residence was located – including ours. The ambassador’s house was not even visible from our apartment, but we still were not allowed to go anywhere near the windows. Who knew what weapons we might have had stashed in our cupboards?

After Nixon, the Soviet Union was given the opportunity to see two more American presidents in the 1970s: Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. Their visits were also interesting, but as we became more accustomed to American presidents in Moscow, the excitement diminished. Then Brezhnev began to travel here and there: to the United States, to France, to West Germany. It was as if there was no Iron Curtain, although few of Brezhnev’s compatriots were able to follow in his footsteps. But we did at least get to see our increasingly decrepit leader kissing and hugging Nixon, Ford, Carter, Pompidou, and Willy Brandt, and then return home, where he exchanged kisses at the airport with all the members of the Politburo. These embraces inspired the joke that the leaders were not actually giving each other the traditional three kisses on alternating cheeks, but whispering into alternating ears, “Did you bring jeans? Did you bring jeans? Did you bring jeans?” What other reason was there to travel to the West besides getting your hands on blue jeans?

After Nixon’s visit, a few American films were shown in the Soviet Union, Soviet-U.S. trade in grain and oil was expanded, and a tiny number of our citizens were fortunate enough to be allowed to go abroad for work or study. Some human rights activists were released from labor camps and a few dozen “refuseniks” were given permission to leave the country. But then, seven years after Nixon’s visit, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. The age of détente made way for the era of Ronald Reagan and “Star Wars.” Nixon had long since been impeached; Brezhnev was still clinging to his Kremlin throne, but with each year he was becoming less and less coherent.

The brief respite from Soviet-American tensions in the seventies was undoubtedly a good thing, especially in comparison with the early eighties, during which the threat of nuclear war hung over our two countries.

But those Politburo members must have been relieved when Brezhnev stopped making his trips abroad so they no longer had to keep kissing those increasingly unappealing jowls.