ABSTRACT
One of the most famous events marking the Cold War tension’s capacity to infiltrate all aspects of life revolved around a washing machine (GE: sunshine yellow). The image of Nixon and Khrushchev standing together at the American Exhibition in Moscow in 1959, observing a scene of suburban domestic life, is second only to images of Sputnik and the first lunar landing in its ability to allegorically summarize the “peaceful race”—Khrushchev’s term of endearment for the Cold War—that held the world in balance for the four decades after the Yalta Conference of 1945 (Figure 4.1). On June 24, 1959, the first day of Nixon’s visit to the Soviet Union, Khrushchev and Nixon also talked about missile capabilities and the freshly endorsed “Captive Nations Resolution” (which condemned Soviet involvement in Eastern European states). The capacity of washing machines and television sets to conjure up enough symbolism to push the missiles and political oppression into the background of the collective, global imaginary in this instant, dramatizes the extent to which lifestyle was one of the most captivating and symbolically powerful registers of the Cold War. Powerful—precisely because it implicated the private lives and daily decisions of the masses on both sides of the divide. 1 Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and US Vice President Richard Nixon reviewing the American Kitchen, American Exhibition, Sokolniki Park, Moscow, 1959 https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780203142721/3f14115e-4a5e-4ae9-80de-b7806af87db7/content/fig4_1_B.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>
