Russia: Tools of Understanding

• Share

To demonstrate its pique over the U.S. stand in Viet Nam, the Kremlin has put a damper lately on portions of the U.S.-Russian cultural-exchange program. The American Ballet Theater arrived in Moscow last June to an officially cool reception. After the bombing of the Hanoi-Haiphong oil depots, the Russians stood the Americans up at a scheduled Soviet-American track meet in Los Angeles; when U.S. swimmers came to Moscow, Pravda reported the meet without mentioning them. Last month American Jazz Pianist Earl ("Fa-tha") Hines's sextet, on an official tour of Russia, found its bookings in Moscow and Leningrad suddenly canceled, was detoured by its government hosts to a string of Off-Broadway stands in the Black Sea area.

Yet the Russians apparently have no desire to end the exchanges. Last week the U.S. opened its eighth State Department-sponsored exhibit in the Soviet Union, in the Ukrainian industrial city of Kharkov 400 miles south of Moscow.

That the show was not in the capital was the U.S.'s own choice. Explained a State Department spokesman: "We wanted to get the stuff out into the countryside." Featured in the exhibition was a typical, if mundane, fixture of American life: do-it-yourself hand tools turned out by 85 U.S. manufacturers.

The display was an instant hit. Following a friendly welcoming speech in Ukrainian by the mayor, nearly 10,000 luxury-hungry Kharkovites a day carefully examined the exhibit in a barnlike gym in a city park. Though the items on display ranged from handsaws to hammers (but no sickles), favorite attractions included such house hold gimmicks, enthralling to the average Soviet citizen, as magnetic paint guns, electric mixers and carving knives and power mowers.

After a month in Kharkov, the U.S. exhibit, which is being transported in a special train provided by the Kremlin, will pack up its tool sets and head to the Lower Don city of Rostov and thence to Erevan, capital of Soviet Armenia. Inaugurating the display in Kharkov, U.S. Ambassador to Moscow Foy D. Kohler noted that "at a time when political relations between our governments are not as good as they might be," such exhibits "help create a climate of understanding and good will between our two peoples" that "cannot but facilitate the search for solutions to political problems and the maintenance of peace."