August 25, 2009
Senior Fellow Sergei Khrushchev is speaking this week at "Khrushchev in Iowa," a four-day conference in Des Moines commemorating his father's historic 1959 visit to the Midwestern state. He will also appear this weekend on C-SPAN Book TV, in one of many 50-year anniversary remembrances of Nikita Khrushchev’s two-week diplomatic tour of the US, the first ever made by a Soviet leader.
Primarily, Khrushchev’s itinerary took him through large cities, like Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, and Washington, DC, as he not only held talks with government leaders, but met with film stars, toured supermarkets, and made an abortive attempt to visit Disneyland. However, at the invitation of Iowan Roswell Garst, a successful farmer, entrepreneur, and hybrid seed corn innovator, the Soviet leader also made time for a two-day stop in Iowa that would allow him to observe firsthand US advances in agricultural technology.
One of those days was spent entirely at Garst's own expansive, modern farm. As recounted recently in the Des Moines Register, Garst and Khrushchev had come to know each other prior to Khrushchev's visit, as a result of Garst's lobbying of the US government to obtain permission to sell surplus US grain to impoverished Eastern European countries. Although each believed strongly in the merits of their governments' respective economic systems, the article said, the two men shared a deep interest in the power of agricultural modernization and would develop an improbable friendship in the midst of the Cold War. In 1955, Garst visited the Soviet Union at Khrushchev's invitation and ultimately procured a Soviet order for 5,000 tons of US seed corn.
In 1959, a 24 year-old Sergei Khrushchev accompanied his father on his trip to Garst's farm. Speaking to the Des Moines Register last week, he said, "I think that Mr. Garst's relations with my father were not less important than his relations with the American president. They understood each other, and they represented the mood of the people."
Thirty-six Russian visitors will join Khrushchev in Des Moines this weekend, with the delegation including various government officials.
The conference's opening event will see Khrushchev speaking about his father before a public audience with Pulitzer Prize-winner William Taubman, author of 2003's Khrushchev: The Man and His Era. Subsequent conference events will focus on progress in agricultural productivity and sustainability and citizen diplomacy in US-Russian relations.
Khrushchev will also appear on C-SPAN2’s Book TV with Peter Carlson, author of K Blows Top: A Cold War Comic Interlude, Starring Nikita Khrushchev, America's Most Unlikely Tourist. The book provides an account of the Soviet leader's varied experiences on his two-week tour, and will run on August 29, 30, and 31.
In July, Khrushchev participated in an academic discussion of another episode in the history of US-Soviet public diplomacy when he attended George Washington University's conference, "Face-off to Facebook: From the Nixon-Khrushchev Kitchen Debate to Public Diplomacy in the 21st Century." The "kitchen debate" refers to a famous public argument between then Vice President Richard Nixon and Khrushchev that took place while the two men toured a mock-up of a typical American kitchen at the American National Exhibition in Moscow's Sokolniki Park. The 1959 exhibition, which was meant to showcase the myriad everyday advantages of the capitalist system, fell within a broader cultural exchange program between the two superpowers.
By Watson Institute Student Rapporteur Tristan Humble ‘09