SUMMARY:

The article introduces the archival publication of original handwritten comments of Soviet visitors to the American National Exhibition in Moscow in 1959. Known to the public mainly due to the Khrushchev–Nixon “kitchen debate,” the exhibition was one of the most remarkable events in U.S.–Soviet relations of the Cold War era. Historians who studied this exhibition used various documentary sources, memoirs, and visual materials, however none of them had access to the original books of comments from the exhibition. Until now, only the English-language translation of selected entries from the books were available from the USIA records in NARA. The absence of the original comments imposed serious limitations on scholars’ abilities to evaluate Soviet perceptions of America and American culture during Khrushchev’s Thaw.
The author of this publication found four original books of comments from the American National Exhibition in a private archive in the United States. Michael Jelisavcic, the present owner of these documents, inherited them from his father, Mikhailo Jelisavcic, who in the late 1950s worked in the Moscow office of American Express Co., and collaborated with the USIA team of interpreters from Russian at the exhibition. The article contains a brief review of historiography and documents on the history of the exhibition, with a special focus on the original handwritten books of comments as a unique primary source, now open again after more than fifty years.