Communist Daze

This darkly comic memoir “reveal[s] much about the poverty, drunkenness, political corruption, anti-Semitism, and fundamental absurdity of rural life in the Soviet 1960s” (Deborah A. Field author of Private Life and Communist Morality in Khrushchev’s Russia ). Welcome to Gradieshti, a Soviet village awash in gray buildings and ramshackle fences, home to a large, collective farm and to the most oddball and endearing cast of characters possible. For three years in the 1960s, Vladimir Tsesis—inesti