The kitchen as political symbol and material reality in the cold war years.

With primary sources never before translated into English, Kitchen Debate and Cold War Consumer Politics connects this debate, which profoundly shaped the economic, social, and cultural contours of the Cold War era, to consumer society, gender ideologies, and geopolitics.

This book demonstrates the ways in which the kitchen - the centerpiece of domesticity and consumerism - was deployed as a recurring motif in the ideological and propaganda battles of the Cold War. Beginning with the famous Nixon-Khrushchev kitchen debate, Baldwin shows how Nixon turned the kitchen into a space of exception, while contemporary writers, artists, and activists depicted it as a site of cultural resistance. Focusing on a wide variety of literature and media from the United States and the Soviet Union, Baldwin reveals how the binary logic at work in Nixon's discourse - setting U.S. freedom against Soviet totalitarianism - erased the histories of slavery, gender subordination, colonialism, and racial genocide. The Racial Imaginary of the Cold War Kitchen treats the kitchen as symptomatic of these erasures, connecting issues of race, gender, and social difference across national boundaries. This rich and rewarding study - embracing the literature, film, and photography of the era - will appeal to a broad spectrum of scholars.

Greg Castillo presents an illustrated history of the persuasive impact of model homes, appliances, and furniture in Cold War propaganda.

The kitchen as political symbol and material reality in the cold war years. Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev's famous “kitchen debate” in 1958 involved more than the virtues of American appliances. Both Nixon and Khrushchev recognized the political symbolism of the modern kitchen; the kind of technological innovation represented in this everyday context spoke to the political system that produced it. The kitchen connects the “big” politics of politicians and statesmen to the “small” politics of users and interest groups. Cold War Kitchen looks at the kitchen as material object and symbol, considering the politics and the practices of one of the most famous technological icons of the twentieth century. Defining the kitchen as a complex technological artifact as important as computers, cars, and nuclear missiles, the book examines the ways in which a range of social actors in Europe shaped the kitchen as both ideological construct and material practice. These actors—from manufacturers and modernist architects to housing reformers and feminists—constructed and domesticated the technological innovations of the postwar kitchen. The home became a “mediation junction” in which women users and others felt free to advise producers from the consumer's point of view. In essays illustrated by striking period photographs, the contributors to Cold War Kitchen consider such topics as Soviet consumers' ambivalent responses to the American dream kitchen argued over by Nixon and Khrushchev; the Frankfurter Küche, a European modernist kitchen of the interwar period (and its export to Turkey when its designer fled the Nazis); and the British state-subsidized kitchen design so innovative that it was mistaken for a luxury American product. The concluding essays challenge the received wisdom of past interpretations of the kitchen debate.

Concentrating on the formative years of the Cold War from 1943 to 1957, Patryk Babiracki reveals little-known Soviet efforts to build a postwar East European empire through culture. Babiracki argues that the Soviets involved in foreign cultural outreach tried to use "soft power" in order to galvanize broad support for the postwar order in the emerging Soviet bloc. Populated with compelling characters ranging from artists, writers, journalists, and scientists to party and government functionaries, this work illuminates the behind-the-scenes schemes of the Stalinist international propaganda machine. Based on exhaustive research in Russian and Polish archives, Babiracki's study is the first in any language to examine the two-way interactions between Soviet and Polish propagandists and to evaluate their attempts at cultural cooperation. Babiracki shows that the Stalinist system ultimately undermined Soviet efforts to secure popular legitimacy abroad through persuasive propaganda. He also highlights the limitations and contradictions of Soviet international cultural outreach, which help explain why the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe crumbled so easily after less than a half-century of existence.

Catalog of an exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Sept. 15, 2010-May 2, 2011.