ME AND MY RUSSIAN WIFE

Some eleven years and nine months as an A.P. correspondent in Russia provides a lively chronology of the war years and after and subdues the ""gloom and doom"" to the discomforts of life in a country where everything was dear, except human life, until the post-war ""hate-America"" propaganda made the years there both difficult and dangerous. The ordeal of railway travel (he lost thirty pounds en route) in the early days-1941; a sad Christmas party when only two out of thirty-five ballerinas appeared; a cold spell at the front- lead to Moscow where he was to meet Tamara whom he finally married only after Wendell Willkie's direct intercession with Stalin. The end of the war brought him the first written interview with Stalin, a Pulitzer Prize, and a short trip home- but with his return, the cold war blew frigid and no influence could secure a visa, for Tamara, and two small daughters. With Stalin's death, the whole climate of suspicion and suppression cleared- and Bohlen, the new American Ambassador, was able to return the Gilmores to America.... An animated account, perhaps of more personal intelligence than global significance, low in protocol and high in spirits- for the audience of Charles Thayer's Bears in the Caviar.