Fifty years ago today former Soviet Premiere Nikita Khrushchev visited the ISU campus.

While the tensions of the Cold War had not yet gripped the nation, his visit was met with mixed reaction by the United States, Iowans and ISU community.

Khrushchev’s visit took him on a tour of the entire country, but his visit to Iowa was agriculturally motivated.

Roswell Garst, an innovative farmer from Coon Rapids, met Khrushchev during a visit to the Soviet Union in 1955.

The political turmoil surrounding Khrushchev’s visit contributed to the “weird and interesting” interplay between the soviet nation and the rest of the world, said Tom Klobucar, lecturer in political science.

Khrushchev, who became head of the Soviet Union after Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953, wanted to modernize the agricultural production of the USSR as part of the social and economic reforms he planned for the country.

“He was trying to build a better economic life for the citizens of Russia,” Klobucar said. “He wanted to develop the lands, which they called the virgin lands, in the southern part of the country.”

Khrushchev’s visit to Iowa State was met with mixed anticipation from students and faculty, said Ellen Molleston Walvoord who was managing editor of the Iowa State Daily at the time.

“Keep in mind this was the 1950s and the students didn’t get polarized about a lot of things,” Walvoord said. “If the same situation had occurred some time later, I can see what a hot topic it would have been, but this visit was before the relations got so bad that he wouldn’t have come.”

She was part of the entourage that accompanied Khrushchev around the campus and said she remembers asking him a question, but doesn’t remember what it was. She said she was taken aback by his demeanor.

“I anticipated a somewhat intimidating, personal being and it wasn’t that at all,” she said. “He and his wife were both relatively short and quite round and simply looked like a stereotypical old farm couple and he smiled a great deal. He did not seem like a powerful man, I definitely remember that.”

Walvoord said that as she and her husband, who is also a graduate of Iowa State, watched the Cuban Missile Crisis unfold in October of 1962, and she recalled the benign feeling that she’d gotten from the Premiere during his visit.

“He was simply a smiling face, a visitor to Iowa State,” she said. “My general assessment was that he was trying to be very pleasant, trying to fit in with the group and really was there to have a view of agriculture and perhaps learn something.”

While on campus, Khrushchev was taken to a home economics classroom where Diane McComber, alumnus in food science and dietetics, was told she would be giving him a cookbook.

“Dr. James Hilton, President of ISU (It was ISC at the time) called several of us into his office to tell us about the impending Khrushchev visit. [He] made it clear that there had already been some threats on his life, so we could possibly be in danger just to be in a receiving line with him,” McComber wrote in an e-mail. “I certainly thought it was worth the potential danger just to meet him.”

McComber wrote that she and her classmates had taken organic chemistry, inorganic chemistry, biochemistry, analytical chemistry, physics, biology and nutrition courses in order to apply to the study of food and nutrition and this type of coursework was something that one of the tour guides told Khrushchev was important in the agricultural education of the Soviets.

“His comment was ‘in Russia our mothers teach this,’ so clearly we did not get our message across,” McComber wrote.

While the security of Khrushchev’s visit is nothing compared to what Vladimir Putin would have with him, Walvoord said, people weren’t allowed to walk up to the Premiere and talk to him.

Larry McComber, Diane McComber’s husband, was an Army National Guard second lieutenant who helped to control the crowd during Khrushchev’s visit to the ISU pig farm.

“The lead-up to Chairman K’s arrival was almost as interesting as the visit itself,” Larry wrote in an e-mail. “Our army radios let us follow some of the communications about events at the Garst farm and during the motorcade to Ames. Apparently, Garst was upset by the swarm of reporters covering his visitor and angrily threw an ear of corn or something at some of them.”

A liquid fertilizer truck had also broken down and was abandoned on the highway between Garst’s farm and Ames and it looked like a roadside bomb to the security people.

“Several wreckers were immediately dispatched with orders issued in terse, no nonsense language to get to that disabled truck fast and do anything necessary to remove it from [Khrushchev’s] route,” Larry wrote. “Those voices sounded goose-bump serious.”

Larry wrote that the ISU pig farm was very heavily patrolled by security officials.

“Each looked extremely fit in the manner of marathon runners. If they moved just right or if the right gust of wind blew, their coats swung open a bit and a careful observer could see weapons,” Larry wrote. “It’s not that they were carrying a gun like a policeman. They were each carrying an arsenal. They had everything from multiple handguns to disassembled automatic rifles to telescopic sights to ammunition clips and belts. They each wore a tiny lapel pin which we guessed was to identify them as secret service. A couple went to the hayloft of the barn to serve as observers and appeared fully ready, if necessary to act as snipers.”

Klobucar said despite the souring relations between the Soviet Union and the United States the extra security was standard procedure.

“Just imagine the consequences if the head of a foreign state was assassinated in our country,” he said. “In fact there was probably some extra laid on for Khrushchev because of all of the anti-Communist mania in the 1950s and ’60s, I imagine they were quite nervous about that.”

Larry wrote that the visit to the pig farm was relatively uneventful but he had to prove to the crowd that the National Guard meant business.

“The day was warm and that was long for those Iowans who came to observe. They got a little restless and began gently crowding the lines my soldiers had formed,” Larry wrote. “When the soldiers told the crowd to back off, they did so grudgingly. Then a wise guy in the crowd yelled that Army National Guard have no ammunition and their rifles don’t even have firing pins so they can’t shoot if they want to.”

The crowd member was right.

“He must have been a former guardsman,” Larry wrote. “The troops looked good, but their rifles were useless. I had a bullet, but just one. I ordered the troops to attention. That brought a breathless silence from the crowd and caused everyone to look at me. Then I raised my M-1 rifle to port arms and operated a receiver mechanism. That ejected my only bullet and threw it cartwheeling 10 feet into the air. That live, shiny .30-caliber bullet gleamed in the sun on both its ascent and descent. It landed, kerplop, on the hard, bare ground producing a little dust cloud.”

The bullet served its purpose in calming the crowd down, Larry said.

Klobucar said Khrushchev’s fascination with Iowa’s corn and agricultural production was part of what led to the failure of Russia’s agricultural reform and eventual removal of Khrushchev from office.

“The first year they did this Virgin Lands program they actually had a bumper crop but didn’t have the ability to move it to the rest of the country so most of it sat in the fields and rotted,” Klobucar said. “The second year they had a drought, and they were also trying to plant in places they had no business planting. It would sort of be like putting corn in South Dakota or North Texas without proper irrigation, there’s a reason we don’t do that.”