September 15, 2014

A Soviet Leader in the US? Preposterous!


A Soviet Leader in the US? Preposterous!

After years of not recognizing the Soviet Union and then painting it as the root of all evil, September 15, 1959 – 55 years ago from Monday – the US welcomed none other than Nikita Khrushchev, General Secretary of the CPSU.

For the first time ever, a Soviet leader – the face of communism, the hated Bolshevik, the enemy, and so on and so forth – was on American soil. And not with an invading force. General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev had come to visit.

He had been invited earlier the same year by then Vice President Richard Nixon, after a lively but amiable debate at the American National Exhibition in Moscow (video). The debate, which helped build Nixon's toughness factor, featured such typical Khrushchev-isms as “in seven years we will pass you and wave ‘hi’ to you as we go by” and the infamous untranslateable colloquialism “we’ll show you Kuzma’s mother.” The debate was then televised, and the adorably frank Khrushchev made for such good TV that American statesmen were happy to bring the show home.

The interpreter-facilitated Kitchen Debate

And Khrushchev did not fail to deliver. The fun started as soon as he landed on September 15: the plane was too tall for any ramp the American hosts could provide, which Khrushchev was quick to spin into a point in the Soviet Union’s favor (“our planes are too great for those capitalist ramps!”). The networks ran an hour of Khrushchev footage every night of his visit, making him the biggest star on American television.

This was not a diplomatic mission – no major deals were reached, and the speech Khrushchev made at the UN about everyone reducing their militaries and using the money for schools and such was just a propaganda ploy. America was not negotiating with its enemy. She was entertaining him.

And boy was he entertained! In Hollywood, he watched a can-can performance on the set for an upcoming film. In Iowa, he loved how the farmer whose farm he was touring heckled and beat up the reporters that followed him around and trampled the crops. At IBM, he showed little interest in state-of-the-art computers, but was fascinated by the cafeteria, and the nearby supermarket – the unseen wonders of self-service. He was even supposed to go to Disneyland, but it was cut from the itinerary at the last minute due to security concerns.

For a few days, America was Khrushchev's petting zoo

After all the hard-line rhetoric of the Stalin years, this lighthearted visit was a welcome reprieve. The following year President Eisenhower was supposed to pay a return visit, but the era of lightheartedness did not last – in May a US spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union, triggering a crisis and destroying hopes for a détente at the upcoming summit. The entertainment was over. It was back to Cold War business as usual.

 

Smithsonian Magazine video about Khrushchev’s visit.

Also see Peter Carlson's great book on the trip: K Blows Top:

Like this post? Get a weekly email digest + member-only deals

Some of Our Books

Steppe / Степь (bilingual)

Steppe / Степь (bilingual)

This is the work that made Chekhov, launching his career as a writer and playwright of national and international renown. Retranslated and updated, this new bilingual edition is a super way to improve your Russian.
Stargorod: A Novel in Many Voices

Stargorod: A Novel in Many Voices

Stargorod is a mid-sized provincial city that exists only in Russian metaphorical space. It has its roots in Gogol, and Ilf and Petrov, and is a place far from Moscow, but close to Russian hearts. It is a place of mystery and normality, of provincial innocence and Black Earth wisdom. Strange, inexplicable things happen in Stargorod. So do good things. And bad things. A lot like life everywhere, one might say. Only with a heavy dose of vodka, longing and mystery.
Jews in Service to the Tsar

Jews in Service to the Tsar

Benjamin Disraeli advised, “Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.” With Jews in Service to the Tsar, Lev Berdnikov offers us 28 biographies spanning five centuries of Russian Jewish history, and each portrait opens a new window onto the history of Eastern Europe’s Jews, illuminating dark corners and challenging widely-held conceptions about the role of Jews in Russian history.
Faith & Humor: Notes from Muscovy

Faith & Humor: Notes from Muscovy

A book that dares to explore the humanity of priests and pilgrims, saints and sinners, Faith & Humor has been both a runaway bestseller in Russia and the focus of heated controversy – as often happens when a thoughtful writer takes on sacred cows. The stories, aphorisms, anecdotes, dialogues and adventures in this volume comprise an encyclopedia of modern Russian Orthodoxy, and thereby of Russian life.
Chekhov Bilingual

Chekhov Bilingual

Some of Chekhov's most beloved stories, with English and accented Russian on facing pages throughout. 
Marooned in Moscow

Marooned in Moscow

This gripping autobiography plays out against the backdrop of Russia's bloody Civil War, and was one of the first Western eyewitness accounts of life in post-revolutionary Russia. Marooned in Moscow provides a fascinating account of one woman's entry into war-torn Russia in early 1920, first-person impressions of many in the top Soviet leadership, and accounts of the author's increasingly dangerous work as a journalist and spy, to say nothing of her work on behalf of prisoners, her two arrests, and her eventual ten-month-long imprisonment, including in the infamous Lubyanka prison. It is a veritable encyclopedia of life in Russia in the early 1920s.
Woe From Wit (bilingual)

Woe From Wit (bilingual)

One of the most famous works of Russian literature, the four-act comedy in verse Woe from Wit skewers staid, nineteenth century Russian society, and it positively teems with “winged phrases” that are essential colloquialisms for students of Russian and Russian culture.
White Magic

White Magic

The thirteen tales in this volume – all written by Russian émigrés, writers who fled their native country in the early twentieth century – contain a fair dose of magic and mysticism, of terror and the supernatural. There are Petersburg revenants, grief-stricken avengers, Lithuanian vampires, flying skeletons, murders and duels, and even a ghostly Edgar Allen Poe.
Bears in the Caviar

Bears in the Caviar

Bears in the Caviar is a hilarious and insightful memoir by a diplomat who was “present at the creation” of US-Soviet relations. Charles Thayer headed off to Russia in 1933, calculating that if he could just learn Russian and be on the spot when the US and USSR established relations, he could make himself indispensable and start a career in the foreign service. Remarkably, he pulled it of.
The Latchkey Murders

The Latchkey Murders

Senior Lieutenant Pavel Matyushkin is back on the case in this prequel to the popular mystery Murder at the Dacha, in which a serial killer is on the loose in Khrushchev’s Moscow...

About Us

Russian Life is a publication of a 30-year-young, award-winning publishing house that creates a bimonthly magazine, books, maps, and other products for Russophiles the world over.

Latest Posts

Our Contacts

Russian Life
73 Main Street, Suite 402
Montpelier VT 05602

802-223-4955