All the Clean Ones Are Married

In 1991, Lori Cidylo shocked her Ukrainian Polish-born parents when she told them she was leaving her job as a reporter at an upstate New York newspaper to live and work in the rapidly dissolving Soviet Union. For six years, Lori lived in a shoestring budget in Moscow, in tiny, run-down apartments, struggling with broken toilets and indifferent landlords and coping with the daily calamities of life in Russia. As the country experienced its most dramatic transformation since the Bolshevik Revolution, Lori realized she had stepped into a fantastical and absurd adventure. This wry, insightful account of what it was like for an American woman living in Russia provides a delightful, surprising, and warmly human view of post-Soviet life.

Lori Cidylo is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the Boston Herald, the Chicago Tribune, the Economist, the Los Angeles Times Nowaday, and other publications.