Seemingly endless cornfields flanked the roads the first time Sergei Khrushchev stepped onto a western Iowa farmstead in 1959.
Then a 24-year-old rocket scientist, he didn’t care much about farms — he had seen cornfields before.
“For me, it was boring,” said Khrushchev, now 74 and a senior fellow in international studies at Brown University.
But even before he saw hundreds of reporters taking notes and photographs, he knew this visit was a big deal.
Right in the middle of the Cold War, his father, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, was planting his feet on American soil for the first time.
It was, in fact, the first time the head of the Soviet Union had visited America, and this part of the trip was all about Iowa corn.
It has been almost 50 years since that historic visit in September 1959, which forever connected the family of Coon Rapids farmer Roswell Garst with the Soviet Union and, later, Russia.
The Garst family, along with Sergei Khrushchev, will commemorate the event beginning Thursday with four days of activities, including several at the Garsts’ Whiterock Conservancy and Resort near Coon Rapids on Saturday.
The unlikely intersection, however briefly, of these two families from disparate countries was rooted in Nikita Khrushchev’s interest in developing a more efficient agricultural system and Roswell Garst’s desire to make some money.
Khrushchev, who first rose to local prominence in the strongly agricultural Ukraine, had said years earlier that his country needed an “Iowa corn belt.”
Soon after, Garst met with a Russian delegation in Iowa and showed its members his farm and the hybrid seed corn that had made him wealthy and, in the farming world, somewhat famous. Garst had co-founded Garst Seed Co. in 1930 and was known as an early promoter and innovator of hybrid seed corn.
In 1955, 1956 and 1958, Garst made trips to the Soviet Union to sell that seed corn and met with the Soviet premier, who purchased some himself.
When Khrushchev arrived in Coon Rapids, the throng of reporters and photographers blocked the view of Garst’s fields. After exchanging pleasantries, the farmer and Soviet leader spent hours walking along the corn.
The visit was watched and examined by people in both countries. In the Soviet Union, Sergei Khrushchev said, people were hopeful that the trip to the United States would improve relations with Americans, whom they feared would attack and invade their country.
The same fears were pervasive in America, where some looked with suspicion at Khrushchev’s visit to Iowa, California, the United Nations and Washington, D.C.
Some people called Garst a “commie lover,” said Liz Garst, his granddaughter and now a noted soil and water conservationist. She was 8 years old at the time of the visit and oblivious to any negative feelings about the Garsts welcoming the Khrushchevs to their farm.
Wearing a lacy skirt, scratchy petticoats and anklets with her patent leather shoes, she didn’t hesitate to climb into the lap of Nina Khrushcheva, Nikita’s wife.
“I liked her. She smelled good and didn’t hold me too tight,” Garst said.
Sergei Khrushchev remembers only hospitality from the Americans he met.
“I think it’s one of the mythologies that the people of the United States were against this visit,” he said.
Liz Garst saw some of that resistance a few years later, when a young girl from St. Louis canceled a trip to visit her in Iowa. The two had met at a summer camp and become fast friends. But when the girl’s parents found out that Garst’s grandfather had hosted Khrushchev, the relationship ended.
Roswell Garst, who died in 1977, wasn’t a communist, his granddaughter said. Rather he was a devoted capitalist who saw a chance to make money and practice some “full-bellied diplomacy” by helping the Soviets achieve a better way of life, Liz Garst said.
People weren’t starving in the Soviet Union, but their standard of living was lower than that of Americans, and Soviets weren’t as productive in agriculture and other sectors, Sergei Khrushchev said.
“My father thought that we will learn everything from the United States. We will be good students, and very soon we will be ahead of the United States. That was not successful.”
They had heard of life in America. They had seen photographs. But when the Soviet premier and his son arrived in the United States, it was a truly foreign land to them.
“It was like the Christopher Columbus discovery of America, undiscovered world,” Khrushchev said. “We cannot say that we were surprised that Americans were much better living than Soviets. We knew this.”
The trip had implications beyond Iowa, said Stan Johnson, a retired Iowa State University professor and chairman of the National Center for Food and Agriculture Policy.
“Most of the Russian farmers didn’t know anything that went on outside of Russia,” he said.
Since that time, a series of agricultural exchanges have opened up a world of trade between the countries as well as agricultural progress in Russia.
“Roswell Garst had a major influence on agricultural exchanges with the Soviet Union, and it continues even today,” Johnson said.
Iowa State had several demonstration farms in Russia and Ukraine in the 1980s. Now, several universities across the country have agricultural exchanges with Russia.
For one western Iowa family, the connection will always mean more than the development of better food sources in Russia. It’s about the power of one stubborn, gregarious Iowan to help effect true change.
“How unbelievable that a farmer from Coon Rapids, Iowa, could make a difference in world affairs.” Liz Garst marveled. “And he did.”
Contact the writer:
444-1310, elizabeth.ahlin@owh.com
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