These exhibitions were part of an expansive effort to pitch US-style capitalism to war-weary, communist-sympathetic Europeans. It was one of the most effective propaganda campaigns in American history: Thousands of visitors flooded in to catch a glimpse of a very foreign notion of modern life—first in Berlin, then across West Germany and Italy, and eventually in the USSR itself. At the first Moscow exhibit in 1959, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev erupted in anger at his guide, then-Vice President Richard Nixon, over the display of American decadence. In the years following, Khrushchev tried to fight the propaganda not by opposing consumerism, but by embracing it in state media, promising that comparable Soviet products were already available or soon would be. (They weren’t and wouldn’t be.) The move backfired spectacularly, according to a 2005 article by historian Greg Castillo, validating America’s message about the superiority of capitalism as an economic system in the eyes of regular Soviets. “A runaway inflation of consumer desire ultimately bankrupted the political economy of Soviet-style socialism,” he wrote. Once the people see a dishwasher, they want a dishwasher.