Episode 82: When Pepsi Cracked the Iron Curtain

The Cold War wasn't fought only with missiles.It was also fought with supermarkets, television cameras, vodka, and a simple paper cup filled with Pepsi.This month, Tracing The Path follows the surprising chain of events that led an American soft drink behind the Iron Curtain—and a Russian vodka into American liquor stores.Along the way you'll discover the forgotten friendship between Russia and the United States, the invention of videotape by Ampex, the famous Kitchen Debate between Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev, the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow, and the remarkable business deal that briefly made Pepsi the owner of the world's seventh-largest navy.It's the story of how commerce, technology, and ordinary consumer products accomplished what politics often could not.And why, decades later, Vladimir Putin chose to reverse nearly all of it.