2024-03-04 02:09:22
In the summer of 1959, sixty-five years ago, the famous “kitchen debate” between Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and American Vice President Richard Nixon took place in Moscow. Khrushchev said there that the Soviets are already ahead of the US in many ways and within seven years they will be far ahead of them in everything. American magazine photojournalists who came with Nixon, but saw the Soviet Union and its satellites quite differently.
While Khrushchev spoke of progress and socialist prosperity, they in the Soviet Union, Poland, Yugoslavia and East Germany saw and photographed ruined cities that had not yet recovered from the damage of war and a poor countryside implementing collectivist farming.
The kitchen debate took place at the American National Exhibition in Moscow. It was launched by then-Vice President Richard Nixon, and Soviet leader Khrushchev accompanied him. Her goal was to show people in the Soviet Union how Americans live. The exchange of views took place in the kitchen of the model house, which was equipped with a dishwasher, refrigerator and stove. The exhibition was supposed to show what the dwelling in which an ordinary American worker lives looks like.
The so-called “kitchen debate” between Nikita Khrushchev (second from left, wearing hat) and Richard Nixon. | Photo: Thomas O’Halloran, Library of Congress, US News & World Report Magazine Collection
“I want to show you this kitchen,” Nixon said, pointing to the dishwasher. “We have such things too,” replied Khrushchev.
“This is the latest model that is installed in thousands of American homes. We are trying to make life easier for women,” said Nixon. Khrushchev responded by criticizing the capitalist approach to women, which does not exist in the Soviet Union.
Nixon then began to explain that a similar house could be purchased, for example, by any of the striking workers in the American steel mills at the time, for $14,000 (today it would be $148,000, or roughly 3.5 million crowns). He meant a mortgage purchase. Khrushchev responded by saying: “We have steel workers and peasants who can also afford to spend $14,000 on a house. But your American houses only last twenty years so that construction companies can keep selling new and new houses. We build honestly. We build for our children and grandchildren.”
Then Khrushchev declared: “The Americans have created their own image of the Soviet man. But he is not what you think. You think that the Russian people will be amazed when they see these things, but… The fact is that the newly built Russian houses already have everything this equipment.”
Nixon admitted during the debate that there are areas in which the Soviets are ahead of America. He cited the technical parameters of space rockets as an example. Then, of course, he pointed to the color television and said, “In this one, we’re ahead of you again.”
Khrushchev disagreed: “No, never. We have overtaken you in rockets and we are also ahead of you in this technology.” At the same time, he explained to Nixon that soon the Soviet Union would be ahead of the United States in everything. “Let’s say that America has existed for one hundred and fifty years and here is its level. We have existed for almost forty-two years and in another seven we will be on the same level as America. And then we will move on. When we pass you on the way, we will give you a friendly wave,” he stated.
As the photojournalists of an American magazine saw it
At the time this “kitchen debate” took place, Richard Nixon was accompanied on his tour of the Soviet Union and its socialist satellite countries by US News & World Report Magazine photojournalists Warren Leffler and Thomas O’Halloran. In 1959, they visited the Soviet Union, Poland, Yugoslavia and also Berlin, divided into western and eastern parts. We don’t know whether their pictures are a targeted response to the “kitchen debate” or whether they were just trying to capture ordinary life in Eastern Europe. Both will likely play a role.
Shop in Gorkij kolkhoz 2. | Photo: Warren K. Leffler, Library of Congress, US News & World Report Magazine Collection
However, it can be seen from the brief captions under the photos that some facts caught these journalists by surprise. For example, when Warren Leffler got into a store (probably selling agricultural products) that was part of the Moscow kolkhoz Gorky 2. Kolkhozes were agricultural cooperatives, similar to our JZD. Leffler didn’t seem to want to admit that he actually saw the deal. In the caption of the photo, he wrote: “Women and a boy are standing in front of a counter in a small room with shelves on the Gorky 2 collective farm. Cabbage, scales and an abacus are on the counter.”
The images of photojournalists from Eastern and Central Europe often depict dusty streets without asphalt, houses still broken after the Second World War, horse-drawn carriages between cars and poor countryside. Only footage taken in former Yugoslavia and from the center of Moscow have a more positive tone.
A little girl in Warsaw hands US Vice President Richard Nixon a flower through the roof of his car. | Photo: Thomas O’Halloran, Library of Congress, US News & World Report Magazine Collection
Czechoslovakia is not in the photos, but Poland is
Czechoslovakia is not in the pictures, but some of them show neighboring Poland. The visit of American Vice President Nixon had a great response there, even though the communist government there did not want it.
There was (and still is) a strong Roman Catholic Church in Poland, many Poles disliked the Russians, and there was strong anti-communist sentiment. The Polish government at the time, subject to Soviet influence, feared Nixon’s visit. She did not want public manifestations of friendship for America to break out. Therefore, Nixon could not land at Warsaw’s civilian airport, but at the military field airport outside the city. The Polish government kept secret where Nixon’s limousine would go and did not place American flags on the roads, although it used to be customary for foreign visits.
However, Radio Free Europe published the route. And so, on their own initiative, more than a hundred thousand Poles set out to welcome the American vice president, the first high-ranking Western official to visit communist Eastern Europe.
The photos come from the archives of US News & World Report, which donated them to the Library of Congress and transferred all rights to the images to the public. As stated on the library’s website, there are no known restrictions on these particular photos that would prevent them from being published.