Under the 1958 U.S.-Soviet cultural agreement, the Soviets opened an exhibition in New York in June 1959, and in July the American National Exhibition opened in Moscow’s Sokolniki Park with more than 450 American companies and a geodesic dome the Soviet government later bought. Its centerpiece was a model suburban house, said to cost about 14,000 dollars, cut in half so crowds could look inside at its appliances. On July 24, 1959, Vice President Richard Nixon toured the exhibition with Premier Nikita Khrushchev in four escalating encounters, beginning at the Kremlin, where Khrushchev was furious over Congress’s Captive Nations Resolution and boasted the Soviet Union would match American technology in seven years.
Khrushchev mocked a hand-held lemon squeezer and asked whether Americans had a machine to push food down people’s throats, recalling Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. In the exhibition’s television studio he demanded the debate air in America, and Nixon agreed if it aired in Russian too. Nixon conceded some products were prototypes and said it was better to compete over washing machines than weapons, and in the model kitchen he argued the appliances made life easier for women, which Khrushchev rejected as a capitalistic attitude toward women. American networks aired the color videotape on July 25, while Moscow broadcast it late at night with Nixon only partly translated. More than 2.7 million Soviet visitors came in 42 days.
- One Soviet visitor wrote that the aim should be to free women from the kitchen entirely, not fill it with gadgets.
- The New York Times called the encounter a superficial stunt, while Time praised Nixon’s confidence.
- The clash boosted Nixon’s standing ahead of the 1960 Republican nomination.
- In 1961 Khrushchev joked to John F. Kennedy that by arguing with Nixon he had voted for Kennedy.
- Khrushchev predicted Nixon’s grandchildren would live under communism, and his own son Sergei later became a naturalized American citizen.
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