Selling Splitnik; or, Aunt Olga Goes to Moscow

During the summer of 1959, the American National Exhibition in Moscow (ANEM) erected an “American corner” in Sokol’niki Park. A joint venture of the United States Information Agency (USIA) and hundreds of American corporations, the ten-acre exhibition was a showcase for American capitalism, an effort to convince Soviet citizens that consumer choice and capitalist innovation made for better and more fulfilling lives. Nearly three million visitors toured the exhibition over the course of forty-two days.

The “Kitchen Debate,” ANEM Color Television Studio, July 24, 1959. All images, unless otherwise noted, are Kodacrhome slides by Olga Pawlick.

Popular memory of ANEM centers on the “Kitchen Debate” between U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. The debate took place on ANEM’s opening day at the kitchen of “Splitnik,” a six-room model ranch home representing the standard of living for a middle-class American family. (The nickname was a play on Sputnik and the wide passage cut through the model home’s center so crowds could file through.)¹ Standing before the kitchen, and later in ANEM’s color television studio, Nixon lectured Khrushchev using what scholar Kate Baldwin has called his “kitchen logic,” in which American prosperity hinged on women and housewives—terms Nixon used interchangeably—enjoying the conveniences of consumer appliances.² During these exchanges, Nixon might have scanned the room and seen ANEM press officer Olga Pawlick. Nixon’s kitchen logic may have led him to see Olga as a middle-aged American housewife and mother, a woman defined by Splitnik’s modern conveniences. But Olga’s story was actually quite different. 

Olga Pawlick was a career U.S. Foreign Service employee. She was also my grandmother’s eldest sister. Raised in a Russian-speaking home in Detroit, Olga’s life was the stuff of enigmatic family legend. She never married or had children, and she spent much of her adult life living itinerantly in Europe and the Soviet Union on a diplomatic passport—a far cry from the domesticated ideals of Splitnik. At the close of the Second World War, Olga went to work for the State Department in Germany and Austria. In early 1959, after completing a linguistics degree at Georgetown, she signed on with USIA. The previous year, the United States had signed a wide-ranging cultural exchange agreement with the Soviet Union, marking a new phase of US-Soviet relations which prioritized the “soft power” of cultural diplomacy and required Olga’s professional skills as a Russian-speaking stenographer (and also her diplomatic discretion). That spring, she set off for Moscow.³

Visitors surrounding ANEM book display, September 4, 1959.

At ANEM, the Cold War was fought not by soldiers and spies, but by ordinary Americans armed with pins, pamphlets, and Pepsi-Cola. USIA’s hope was that visitors might be prompted to question the Soviet system if they had personal interactions with Americans who could testify to the blessings of capitalist freedom and consumerist choice. Many of the USIA guides and administrative staff, including Olga, were Russian-Americans. Olga’s work required her to interact with people with whom she shared linguistic and cultural commonalities, yet whose lives she found profoundly difficult to understand. We can learn much from the letters she wrote home, which ended up in her sister’s (my grandmother’s) possession when Olga died, and are now at my parents’ house. The letters from Moscow have been kept together in their mailing envelopes, rubber-banded and sequentially numbered. In the letters, Olga expressed perspectives on Soviet life that became more nuanced the longer she remained in Moscow; yet she remained firm in her commitment to consumer capitalism and ANEM’s mission, however untethered she may have been from the domestic world of Nixon’s kitchen logic. Olga ultimately left ANEM with a clearer commitment to the importance of cultural diplomacy in the communist world—promoting a way of life that little resembled her own.

Construction of ANEM, including Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome, c. May 1959.

Olga was among the first American personnel to arrive at Sokol’niki, as Soviet workers (many of them women) were rapidly transforming ten acres of forested parkland into ANEM’s futuristic pavilions. “The less glamorous work is left to the women,” she observed; “men are given preference here.”⁴ On May Day, after counting the placards of Stalin dotting the massive parade on Red Square, she crammed into a crowded church near Sokol’niki for the Good Friday service, unthinkable to miss for a devout Orthodox Christian. “I couldn’t refrain from singing the old familiar hymns,” she wrote. “I felt at home for a very short time (at no other time is there anywhere here anything that reminds one of home).”⁵

As ANEM approached, Olga and other USIA personnel were acutely aware that a parallel Soviet exhibition was underway at the New York Coliseum. The staid displays of Soviet scientific and technological achievements, including Sputnik, received only middling reviews. USIA saw cultural diplomacy in win-loss terms and wanted ANEM to outshine its counterpart. It hoped, as Kate Baldwin summates, that Soviet visitors could not help but grasp a simple message: “we have stuff and it makes us happy.”⁶

Soviet women landscaping ANEM grounds, Sokol’niki Park, c. April 1959.

Soviet drivers with a USIA Chevrolet, Moscow, c. May 1959.

Working six long days a week at ANEM, Olga had little time or energy to explore Moscow. Each workday she rode to Sokol’niki Park in a black Chevrolet, itself a kind of rolling ANEM. “We all experience the feeling of monkeys in a cage,” she wrote, “the Russians swarm around and look at and in the car (thru windows, of course. I enjoy this self-consciously.)”⁷ Once at the press office, only a short flight of stairs from Splitnik, Olga mostly interacted with ANEM’s Soviet support staff, not with ticketed visitors. Perhaps even more so than the visitors downstairs, these coworkers were reading and internalizing the Soviet media’s sustained counter-propaganda campaign against ANEM. These accounts painted ANEM as unrealistic, and many argued that the exhibition’s idealism sidestepped issues of economic and racial inequality. “These people hear the same thing over and over,” Olga observed, “and many of them believe only what they read.”⁸

Splitnik in particular was a constant target of the counter-propaganda campaign. In late June, amidst “another blast at our ‘typical home,’” Olga reported that “I told our girls I preferred our type of home (Detroit) because it had a full basement and an attic, and that lots of people had better homes than the typical home to be displayed.” She described their reaction in a word: “Disbelief.”⁹ Eager not to lose the argument, Olga wrote her brother for pictures of his home in Jackson, Michigan. Upon receiving them via diplomatic pouch, as all ANEM mail was conveyed, she showed them to the support staff to prove that Splitnik was indeed attainable for American working families.¹⁰

From its opening day, ANEM opened a window into a parallel capitalist world teeming with tantalizing choices and modern conveniences. Teeming crowds saw fashion shows and cooking demonstrations, inspected televisions and Chevrolets, and drank Dixie cups of Pepsi-Cola. Inside Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome, designers Ray and Charles Eames beamed 2,200 “Glimpses of the U.S.A.” onto seven screens.

There were displays of modern art and a “Circarama” film by Walt Disney. And most importantly, Soviets filed past Splitnik’s six model rooms. Visitors clamored for souvenirs, despite restrictions on what ANEM guides were allowed to distribute. “But what riots,” Olga wrote, “when they start putting out the pamphlets people don’t wait to take one they tear open the boxes themselves and take handfuls and push each other… It is all unbelievable.”¹¹

On ANEM’s final, frantic day, Olga ventured downstairs to photograph the exhibits, only to be surrounded by a crowd who peppered her on topics from religion to education to furniture. “There are so many people here who just want to talk to an American—about anything. It was fun and I loved it,” Olga recalled. “I told the truth and they knew it and liked it.”¹²Back at the office, a Soviet colleague pressed her to purloin one of the book display’s forty Russian-language Bibles.¹³ And in perhaps her last encounter with Soviet visitors, Olga followed closely behind as Khrushchev made another unexpected visit to ANEM. In the modern art gallery, amidst works by Jackson Pollock and Georgia O’Keeffe, Olga strained to transcribe as Khrushchev exclaimed, “I thank God for not being grown-up enough to understand such forms of art.”¹⁴

Nikita Khrushchev shaking hands with ANEM General Manager Harold McClellan. Anastas Mikoyan, First Deputy Premier of the USSR, stands at left. September 4, 1959.

For all the expense and planning, and hordes of Soviet visitors, Khrushchev’s colorful dismissal suggested what USIA ultimately came to accept: ANEM had rather dramatically missed its mark. Soviet visitors indeed shared midcentury Americans’ fondness for technology and convenience. But they shared Khrushchev’s optimism, expressed to Nixon during the Kitchen Debate, that Soviet industry would soon replicate and even improve on what they saw at ANEM. Soviets too dreamed of Splitnik, but on their own terms.¹⁵

Olga was one of the last Americans to leave Sokol’niki, remaining through October to help manage ANEM’s deconstruction. She would staff USIA exhibitions for another decade, showcasing plastics in Warsaw, graphic design in Yerevan, and medicine in Leningrad, among others. None matched ANEM’s ambitious scope, nor its geopolitical importance, though all shared its emphasis on using cultural diplomacy to wage the Cold War. Her first six months in Moscow helped Olga to understand that Soviet life was defined by the space between dizzying possibility and crushing reality. “This is an experience I wouldn’t have missed,” she wrote in the exhibition’s final days. “I see houses lit up at night—blue fluorescent lamp in one room (one family), in another ceiling lamp with huge fringed orange shade—under these lights the ‘truth’ is read and a bright future is dreamed about.”¹⁶ As her career with USIA began, Olga felt certain that her new vocation in cultural diplomacy was already making a difference. “We left our mark here, I’m sure,” she reflected. “It will not be easy for these people to forget us—another story.”¹⁷

Olga Pawlick and USIA exhibition packing crates, c. 1960, from her Kodachrome collection, photographer unknown.

1. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 10–16; Cristina Carbone, “Staging the Kitchen Debate: How Splitnik Got Normalized in the United States,” in Ruth Oldenziel and Karin Zachmann, eds., Cold War Kitchen: Americanization, Technology, and European Users (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 59–81; Susan E. Reid, “‘Our Kitchen is Just as Good’: Soviet Responses to the American Kitchen,” in Oldenziel and Zachmann, eds., Cold War Kitchen, 83–112.
2. Kate A. Baldwin, The Racial Imaginary of the Cold War Kitchen: From Sokol’niki Park to Chicago’s South Side (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth University Press, 2016), 9.
3. Walter L. Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 1945-1961 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 151-184; Greg Castillo, Cold War on the Home Front: The Soft Power of Midcentury Design (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).
4. Olga Pawlick to Jane and Mrs. Willison, June 3, 1959.
5. Olga Pawlick to Mike Pawlick family, May 8, 1959.
6. Baldwin, Racial Imaginary of the Cold War Kitchen, 21.
7. Olga Pawlick to Jane and Mrs. Willison, June 3, 1959.
8. Olga Pawlick to Mike and Margaret Pawlick, August 2, 1959.
9. Olga Pawlick to Mik and Margaret Pawlick, June 22, 1959.
10. Olga Pawlick to William and Anna Pawlick, July 27, 1959.
11. Olga Pawlick to William and Anna Pawlick, July 27, 1959.
12. Olga Pawlick to William and Anna Pawlick, September 4, 1959
13. Olga Pawlick to Mike and Margaret Pawlick, September 4, 1959
14. Marilyn S. Kushner, “Exhibiting Art at the American National Exhibition in Moscow, 1959: Domestic Politics and Cultural Diplomacy,” Journal of Cold War Studies 4 (Winter 2002): 19.
15. Susan E. Reid, “Who Will Beat Whom? Soviet Popular Reception of the American National Exhibition in Moscow, 1959,” in György Péteri, ed., Imagining the West in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010), 194–236.
16. Olga Pawlick to William and Anna Pawlick, September 4, 1959.
17. Olga Pawlick to Pawlick family, September 4, 1959.