His science studies, meanwhile, passed in a blur. Arrogant by nature, bored with mechanics and physics, he kept dropping in and out of prestigious technical colleges. Right before the exams in his final year, Alla was home after surgery and she roped him into an intense three-day vodka-fueled card game. Sergei never showed up for the exams, didn’t graduate, didn’t care. The Cultural Queue was his life and his drug. He did literal drugs, too, codeine mostly, hence his vampyric complexion. Upon checking into a clinic, he was advised by helpful Soviet doctors that the best way to kick a drug habit was to drink. A lot. Which he did.

The day before ticket sales started, the Cultural Queue climaxed in a raucous marathon of actual standing all the way to the finish line. It could last twelve hours, sometimes eighteen, all-nighters that left Mom physically drained but charged with adrenaline. The final push! One morning at the end of May, Larisa and Sergei staggered from the box office window like a couple of triumphant zombies. Tickets to all five performances of Leonard Bernstein’s New York Philharmonic, still months away, were nestled in their pockets. Mom bought a green-capped bottle of buttermilk and kaloriynie bulchoki, feathery buns studded with raisins, and they collapsed on the long, arching bench by the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory. Its neoclassical bulk gleamed custard-yellow in the morning sun. Mom and Dad kissed for the first time under the statue of a seated Tchaikovsky summoning his music. Men with lumpy briefcases were plodding to work. Burly women in kerchiefs hawked the season’s first lilacs.

For a few weeks Larisa and Sergei were inseparable. Then he cooled. He behaved like a smug, mysterious cat, appearing and then vanishing, passionate one minute, listless and disengaged the next. By July he was gone. The cultural season was over. Days turned into weeks with no news of him, summer was passing, and Mom’s insides twisted in a knot when someone whispered that Sergei was involved with Inna, the line elder. Inna with her glossy black hair, luminous skin, and a rich father.

All of Moscow, meanwhile, stood in another line, not as epic and devastating as the lines at Stalin’s funeral, but as long and tedious as the ochered’ at Lenin’s mausoleum. They were standing to taste Pepsi-Cola at Sokolniki Park. Even my despondent mom was among them.

Well before the official opening of the American National Exhibition, Muscovites streamed to Sokolniki in the north of the city to see what was up, or, rather, what was going up. Amid the raw greenery, U.S. construction workers were helping to erect Buckminster Fuller’s spectacular geodesic dome, all thirty thousand golden, anodized aluminum square feet of it. Even the workers’ colorful hard hats provoked wild curiosity.

To urban intelligentsia, Amerika, imagined from novels and music and movies, loomed as a fervently desired mythical Other. Khrushchev, too, was obsessed with Amerika. Nikita Sergeevich displayed the typical H. sovieticus mix of envy, fascination, resentment, and awe. (He would impetuously tour the United States later that year.) While “churning out missiles like sausages,” as he liked to boast, the verbose, erratic premier simultaneously blathered on about “peaceful coexistence,” promising to beat capitalist frenemy number one nonviolently—“in all economic indicators.” Dognat’ i peregnat’ (catch up and overtake), this was called—the long-standing socialist slogan now recast to target the mighty Yanks. As in, “Let’s catch up and overtake America in dairy and beef production!” Comrades on the streets knew the score, though. “We’d better not overtake,” went a popular wisecrack, “or the Yanks will see our bare asses!” Less cynical Americans, meanwhile, stocked their shelters against Red ICBMs and had nightmares about brainwashing.

In such a heated context, Russia floated a temporizing gesture: a first-ever exchange of exhibitions of “science, technology and culture.” The United States said yes. The Soviets went first. At the New York Coliseum in June 1959, three glistening Sputniks starred with their insectlike trailing filaments and a supporting cast heavy on models of power stations and rows of bulky chrome fridges.

A month later in Moscow, on about a third of the Soviets’ budget, the Yanks retorted with consumerist dazzle—acre upon acre of it at Sokolniki Park. Almost eight hundred companies donated goods for the exhibit.

“What is this,” thundered Izvestia, “a national exhibit of a great country or a branch of a department store?”

Cannily, it was both.

As a girl Mom had visited the socialist fairyland of the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition in Moscow. Now, exactly two decades later, just a mile or so away in Sokolniki, here she was in the Potemkin village of consumer capitalism. Which was more overwhelming? Mom usually giggles and rolls her eyes when I ask.

Inside Bucky’s golden dome, seven giant screens positioned overhead by the designers Charles and Ray Eames flashed with their composite short film Glimpses of the USA. Mom stood open-mouthed, blinking hard as 2,200 still photos pulsed through a “typical” workday and Sunday in suburban America, closing on a lingering image of flowers.

“Nezabudki…” Mom murmured along with the entranced crowd. “Forget-me-nots.”

Beyond the dome waited an empire of household stuff in the Glass Pavilion. Inside stood a model apartment, outside, a model home. A Corvette and a Caddie enticed oglers. There were abstract expressionist paintings to puzzle over, a book exhibit to filch from, Disney’s 360-degree Circarama travelogue of America to crane at. Fashion models ambled along runways while decadent jazz played and ever-smiling American guides answered all comers in fluent Russian. One of the guides was having a fling with Mom’s close friend Radik. My mother couldn’t get over this amerikanka’s non-Soviet directness and her fantastic big teeth.

In this setting, on press preview day, July 25, the spontaneous dialectic known as the Kitchen Debate erupted between Nikita and Nixon. Tension was still running high over the Western insistence on continued free access to West Berlin, surrounded as it was by East Germany. Khrushschev was agitated further by the U.S. Congress’s renewal of its annual “Captive Nations” Resolution to pray for Iron Curtain satellite countries. He carried a chip on his shoulder, vowing not to be overawed by America’s vision of bounty. Nixon in turn hankered for the 1960 Republican presidential nomination. He had to look tough.

Cue the scenario at Sokolniki: