U.S. Fair in Moscow

In Gorky Park along the Moskva River in the heart of Moscow, the first U.S. trade fair ever held in Russia will open its doors this summer. The Soviet government is eager to cooperate; it has already announced the fair in newspapers and magazines, promised to plug it over radio and TV. To handle research, publicity and contracts for the fair, the first commercial office opened in the Soviet Union by any Western country has been set up by America Abroad Associates in Moscow. Yet the U.S. Government is far from happy about this adventure into areas long tightly closed to Americans. The reason is that private U.S. enterprise moved in ahead of the U.S. Government and snagged the contract for the fair. Last week Manhattan Businessman Gottfried Neuburger, 50, the man who wooed the Russians and won, flew to Washington to try to soothe the Government's feelings and persuade it to enter the fair alongside private enterprise.

Fertilizers for Ivan? Neuburger first got the idea for a trade fair in Moscow when he attended Moscow's Agricultural Exhibition in 1954, noted how thousands of Russians flocked in to view dull farm machinery and farm produce. When he approached the U.S. Government with the idea for a U.S. trade fair, it raised no objections but pooh-poohed the notion that the Russians would ever permit such a fair. Neuburger got Manhattan Lawyer Marshall MacDuffie (who, as chief of the UNRRA mission to the Ukraine after World War II, had met Khrushchev) to talk to top Russian brass, himself talked long and hard with Russian trade officials. He got a written agreement to stage the fair last summer, canceled it at U.S. Government request after the Hungarian revolution, signed a new contract last July to exhibit this summer.

Last August, heartened by such assurances that the Russians would welcome a U.S. trade fair, Congress appropriated $2.2 million to finance a U.S. exhibit in Moscow, and a group of Commerce Department officials went to Russia to negotiate. But the Government ended up without an invitation and with Neuburger in control of the property it wanted to use. Government officials grumped that the U.S. could run a better fair than private enterprise, with its interest in profit, expressed fear that Neuburger would stock the fair with industrial machines and fertilizers instead of U.S. consumer goods that would really bedazzle the Russians. So far, the Government has declined to rent any Moscow space from Neuburger on the ground that it can negotiate only on a government-to-government basis.

Audience Participation. Munich-born Gottfried Neuburger. who majored in international affairs at Columbia University, is no newcomer to the fair business. President and founder of America Abroad Associates, whose directors have staged more than 50 big trade shows, he set up the first postwar International Auto Show and the first International Toy Fair in New York, was U.S. representative to the Zagreb. Yugoslavia fair in 1951. The Russians expect 3,000,000 people from all over Russia and the satellites to attend his month-long U.S. fair.

Neuburger hopes to rent 250.000 sq. ft. of space in Gorky Park to private U.S. firms, at $6 per sq. ft. for building space and $3 for open space. Though firms will be allowed to exhibit whatever they please, the fair's directors stress audience-participation exhibits and displays that demonstrate the U.S. way of life. Neuburger plans to have a U.S. supermarket, beauty shows, jiffy shoe repairing shops for Russian visitors; he also hopes to bring some U.S. artists to Moscow to exhibit, get 50 university professors to lecture at the fair. Says he: "If we had a roomful of empty matchbooks on display, they would still stand in line for hours to see it."

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