Cultural Exchange and the Cold War: Raising the Iron Curtain

12 Exhibitions—Seeing is Believing

12 EXHIBITIONS—SEEING IS BELIEVING Exhibits brought a whole generation of Soviets into contact with the West and the United States in particular. They were one of the best investments the United States made. — , in lecture at the Kennan Institute, February ,  “Better to see once than hear a hundred times,” advises an old Russian proverb, and Russians heeded that advice in thronging to see the twenty-three major exhibitions brought to the Soviet Union by USIA under the cultural agreement from  to . What they had heard a hundred times about the United States from their own media was negated by a visit to one of the USIA touring exhibitions, which gave them a glimpse of the United States, its people, and how they lived. The exhibitions also provided a rare opportunity for Soviet citizens to talk with Russian-speaking American guides and ask questions about the United States. The exhibition exchange began in  with Soviet and U.S. national exhibitions at Moscow’s Sokolniki Park and New York City’s Coliseum. That exchange received wide publicity because it was at Sokolniki that Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev, while touring a model American home, engaged in what has come to be known as the “kitchen debate.”1 The two exhibitions were contrasted by Norman Cousins, who saw both: The Soviet exhibition features its vast new industrial capabilities, its jet planes, its automobiles and tractors and trucks, its hydro-electric power installations, its state farms. True, the life and habits of the individual are not ignored in the fair; far from it. But the major theme has to do with energy and a vast industrial forward thrust. By contrast, the American exhibition focuses on the individual citizen —how he goes shopping, how he has his hair cut, what the inside of his home is like, what he does for work and what he does for fun. In short, what everyday is like for many millions of people who live in the U.S.2  . For a firsthand account of the kitchen debate, see the letter to the editor by Hans N. Tuch in the Washington Post, August , . . Norman Cousins,“Tale of Two Exhibitions,” Saturday Review of Literature, August , , . The two  exhibitions were the first in a series of exchanges that continued over the next thirty-two years and gave millions of Soviet and American citizens a look at the achievements of the two countries and how their people lived. The cultural agreement provided for month-long showings of thematic exhibitions in three cities (later increased to six, and then nine) over the two (later three) years of each agreement, to portray life in the United States and the latest developments in a number of specialized fields. Among the U.S. exhibition themes were medicine, technical books, graphic arts, architecture, hand tools, education, research and development, outdoor recreation, technology for the home, photography , agriculture, information, and industrial design. The American exhibitions drew huge crowds, with lines stretching for blocks awaiting admittance, and were seen, on average, by some , visitors in each city. All told, more than  million Soviet citizens are believed to have seen the twenty-three U.S. exhibitions over the thirty-two-year period.3 The exhibitions were staffed with twenty or more Russian-speaking Americans who demonstrated the items exhibited and engaged in spirited conversations with the Soviet visitors. As Eisenhower wrote of the American guides at the  U.S. exhibition at Sokolniki: I was particularly impressed with reports of the group of outstanding United States college students who served as guides and who day after day stood up and in fluent Russian fielded questions of the greatest diversity about life in the United States. In fact, those bright young men and women so impressed their hearers that when some trained Communist agitators began infiltrating the crowd and throwing loaded questions , friendly Russians in the audience would help out by supplying answers in loud whispers.4 What Eisenhower could not have foreseen was that many of the young Russianspeaking American guides would go on to make careers in the Soviet area as scholars , professors, diplomats, and journalists. With their firsthand knowledge of life in the Soviet provinces, they became a national asset during the Cold War years when U.S. knowledge of the Soviet Union as it really was was minimal. Americans in those years could travel to Moscow, Leningrad, and Kiev, but the exhibit guides also went to places seldom visited by Americans, such as Volgograd, Alma Ata, Baku...