This photograph depicts Premier Nikita Khrushchev of the Soviet Union and Vice President Richard Nixon of the United States together in Moscow on July 24, 1959. They met as part of a world’s fair–style exhibition of the United States’ scientific, economic, and cultural achievements. The event, which was filmed and then broadcast soon after in both the United States and the Soviet Union, was the culmination of the U.S.-Soviet Cultural Agreement, which was signed the previous year. Each nation agreed to construct an exhibit in the other’s country in hopes of educating the general population about what everyday life was like in that country. The hope was for the cultural exchange to open the door to mutual understanding and thereby ease Cold War tensions. A month earlier, the Soviet Union opened its exhibition in New York.