Sixty years ago this month, at the height of the Cold War, the February 1958 issue of Popular Science had as its cover feature an account of a motor trip by two Americans, with their dutiful Intourist guide in the back seat, across the Soviet Union from Brest to Moscow and then south to Yalta.

The author, Harry Walton, along with Dennis Michael O’Connor, made the trip in a Belgian-made 1957 Rambler station wagon. After reciting the preconceptions he had of the trip, Walton writes:

The preconceptions were wrong. The Russians I met were not hostile, and the roads and mechanics were first-rate. In several cities I met friendly, curious, wide-awake students (including some who regularly read Popular Science in the technical library). Often I talked with earnest, unsmiling but not unfriendly adults who took to hear their government’s much-repeated slogan: “Beat America.” Everywhere I saw evidences of a dedicated national effort to cram into two decades the industrial revolution that has taken the West two centuries.”