On September 15th, 1959 -- Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev arrived in the United States. It was his first visit to America -- and he stayed for nearly two weeks. Khrushchev's stay included several highlights. He held a summit with President Eisenhower. He had lunch with Frank Sinatra in California. He admired hybrid corn in Iowa. The Soviet leader also left something behind in the Hawkeye State -- a musical gift that remained under wraps until recently. Iowa Public Radio's Rick Fredericksen has the story of what local archivists and musicologists are calling the "Khrushchev Collection."

Fredericksen: Iowans were building bomb shelters, when the leader of the Communist world dropped by for a visit, as recounted in this CBS documentary.

Cronkite:"This is the voice of Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev, a voice that became familiar to Americans in the fall of 1959 when he and his family spent 13 days touring the United States. In this angry speech, Khrushchev is saying the alternative to his disarmament plan, is war."

Fredericksen: I was just a kid but I remember standing on a street corner waving with other Iowans as Khrushchev's motorcade passed by. The Soviet leader was on his way to Coon Rapids to see the Garst farm. At the cattle lot, Roswell Garst had to corral hundreds of reporters.

Garst: "Now you fellows wait a minute. I cannot let you in the cattle lot because if I let you in the cattle lot we wouldn't have any cattle."

Bennett: "It was right in the heart of the Cold War and here we had a man right here in Iowa named Roswell Garst who thought we had some common ground with the Soviets, especially in terms of agriculture."

Fredericksen: Mary Bennett is in charge of special collections at the Historical Society of Iowa. She found herself reflecting on Khrushchev's visit when a package arrived at her office.

Bennett: "This is a set of record albums, if you could see this in person you'd see that its cover is in sort of a green velveteen and it has a blue binding, but right smack dab in the middle is a Russian flag with the hammer and sickle on a red field and a shaft of wheat."

Fredericksen: Premier Khrushchev had presented Iowa's governor with the gift of music...a set of 78 rpm records, 20 albums in all. It was forgotten until last fall, when the state's former first lady, Amelia Loveless, donated the collection to Iowa.

Bennett:"They're still in their original case, they're in mint condition, they're just being slid out of these sleeves for the first time...."

Fredericksen: The collection of more than 150 pieces includes folk songs, propagandist works and classical masterpieces. This is Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, played by one of Russia's greatest pianists, Svyatoslav Richter.

The vinyls are in mint condition

Musicologists say it's likely the records were assembled specifically for Khrushchev's gift box. There are two albums of popular film songs. Another features the Siberian folk choir. And two former Soviet republics -- Ukraine and Estonia -- each got an album. Eric Saylor is a musicologist at Drake University in Des Moines.

Saylor: "The importance is that it does provide a window into what Soviet authority or Soviet officialdom thinks is important about the musical life of their country."

Fredericksen: One of the best-known songs, then and now, is the folk tune Kalinka. Khrushchev brought along a version by the Red Army Choir.

Saylor: "Military groups have music. It's a wonderful thing for moral, it's a great public face for the military if they want to travel around and the Red Army Choir had, at this point in time, certainly in the mid 20th century, a great reputation of being one of the really crack vocal ensembles in Russia."

Fredericksen: One thing about the collection that's surprising, says Saylor, is the inclusion of relatively few propagandist songs...like March of the Tractor Operators, from the film, The Rich Bride.

Saylor: "In the movie The Rich Bride, also known as the Country Bride, it features a tractor driver Alelxi, who falls in love with a buxom wheat farmer, also on the collective farm, Morinka, but finds his chauvinistic attitudes toward female farm workers to be a little bit off putting. But only when the women show that their abilities at wheat stacking parallel those of the men, does Alexi finally learn his lesson and love can be found amidst gender equality, which of course is one of the whole premises behind Soviet collectivism."

Fredericksen: Another piece showcases someone suspected of not always toeing the party line....controversial composer Dmitri Shostakovich.

Saylor: "Shostokovich's fame was such that you couldn't ignore him, the Soviets couldn't just kind of bury him under a rug. Nonetheless, the piece that they chose is, ideologically speaking, a fairly neutral piece, and what is also neat about this Concertino for Two Pianos" is that he's playing with his son Maxim."

Fredericksen: "Do you have a favorite out of the whole collection?”
Saylor: “Well I really like some of the pieces I heard on the 2nd album, of the Federova sisters. These women, the four women in the group, just seem to fly into four-part formation like birds. It's the most wonderful thing."

Saylor: “I think the fact that they do have such a wide range of stuff is telling. They want to show that they aren't just a faceless, communist, socialist regime that has been presented to us for decades by this point, there is variety, there is difference, there are a whole bunch of different ways that music manifests itself and perhaps by implication, so too are the people."

Fredericksen: Khrushchev's musical time capsule has now been reformatted into a CD set, and is available from the State Historical Society of Iowa in Iowa City. For The World, this is Rick Fredericksen in Des Moines.

Listen to more jewels from the Khrushchev Collection:
George Ots, "The Lonely Accordion," (Estonian)

Ukrainian folk song, by the State Choir of Ukraine

"Soviet Athletes' March" by M. Matusovski, E. Kibkalo