cover image Soviet Laughter, Soviet Tears: An American Couple's Six-Month Adventure in a Ukrainian Village

Soviet Laughter, Soviet Tears: An American Couple's Six-Month Adventure in a Ukrainian Village

Christine Dull. Stillmore Press, $23.5 (370pp) ISBN 978-0-9628038-6-4

To the authors, Ohio farmers, glasnost and perestroika have immediate meaning, as they establish in this memoir of a six-month exchange they arranged privately in 1989 whereby they lived on a collective farm in the Ukraine, while two Ukrainians worked in the U.S. on the Dulls' and a neighboring family's farms. These self-described citizen-diplomats, who previously had made five trips to the Soviet Union with peace groups, emerge here as personable, full of rectitude leavened with pragmatism, at once canny and kind. The kolkhoz , covering 26 square miles with five villages and employing l254, although something of a showplace, was primitive by U.S. standards; the Dulls, though, were supplied with the best available, including a car, which they put to frequent use by traveling to give talks on U.S. farming methods. Extending and receiving friendship, they succeeded in ingratiating themselves with the kolkozniks;readers, too, will enjoy their company and find their observations sharp-witted. Photos. (Jan.)