American Society through One Event: Khrushchev's Visit to the United States in September 1959

Nikita Khrushchev trip to the United States is usually described within a framework of Berlin crisis. This imposes very specific perspective in studying it. As the visit had almost no impact on international relations, historians were not really focusing on it in detail. But I suggest to use this particular visit in order to look at the Cold War and Soviet-American relations from the perspective “from below” — of the “American people” which is of course a very complex and composite category), media and academic publications of intellectuals. What was the ordinary people’s vision of the Cold War? How this vision was formed? What did they expect from the visit? How this visit was presented by media and how it was perceived by the broader public? How this event was described in analytical books and how this description was changing under the influence of other events? In this project, I shall try to address these ques-tions and to look at this event from the perspective of ‘ordinary Americans. Using the concept of the Other, I argue that the Americans’ vision of the Cold War was based on concept of mutual understanding and similarity, and their vision of Khrushchev was dualistic: they were gazing at him as at competitor and auditor at the same time. Narratives about the visit were changing under the influence of further events. To achieve this goal authors of these narrative were re-interpret the past and re-shaping the future.