Kitchen Debate

Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev (left, foreground) and U.S. vice president Richard Nixon (right) debate the merits of communism versus capitalism in a model American kitchen at the American National Exhibition in Moscow (July 1959); photo by Thomas J. O'Halloran, Library of Congress collection
U.S. vice president Nixon spars with Khrushchev before reporters and onlookers, including Politburo members Leonid Brezhnev, Anastas Mikoyan and Yekaterina Furtseva at the American National Exhibition at Sokolniki Park, in Moscow, 1959

The Kitchen Debate (Russian: Кухонные дебаты, romanized: Kukhonnye debaty) was a series of impromptu exchanges through interpreters between U.S. vice president (later U.S. president) Richard Nixon and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, at the opening of the American National Exhibition at Sokolniki Park in Moscow on July 24, 1959.

American exhibitors built an entire house for the exhibition, which they claimed anyone in the United States could afford. It was filled with labor-saving and recreational devices meant to represent the fruits of the capitalist American consumer market. The debate was recorded on color videotape, and Nixon made reference to this fact; it was subsequently broadcast in both countries.

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