The Foreign Service Journal, May 2023

24 MAY 2023 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL One of the Best Public Diplomacy Programs Ever Up Close with American Exhibit Guides to the Soviet Union 1959-1991 FOCUS PUBLIC DIPLOMACY: THE COLD WAR AND BEYOND The USIA exhibit guides were young and enthusiastic, and they spoke Russian. Here’s what it was like to be on the front lines of the Cold War. A merican traveling exhibits in the USSR between 1959 and 1991 were the centerpiece of the U.S.-Soviet Cultural Exchange Agreement signed in 1958. Renewed annually, the agreement served as the basis for joint programming until formally abrogated by the Kremlin after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The “American Exhibitions to the USSR” program began with the American National Exhibition in Moscow in 1959, the setting of the famous “kitchen debate” between Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, and ended with Design USA in 1991. The exhibitions—meant to introduce America to Soviet citizens and to dispel misinformation about the U.S.—showcased American ingenuity in 87 separate show- ings of 19 exhibitions across 12 time zones of the Soviet Union. (See map opposite.) On display across the exhibits were examples of American ingenuity, technology, and daily life—from graphic arts, pho- tography, and agriculture to outdoor recreation, technology for the home, and medicine. The exhibits reached scientists, educators, government leaders, industrial managers, intel- lectuals, artists, and the average worker in some 25 different cities—from the cosmopolitan centers of Moscow, Leningrad