The Foreign Service Journal, May 2023

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MAY 2023 29 I served as an exhibit guide with Tech- nology for the American Home from September 1975 to March 1976. We were involved in building and taking down the exhibit in the Soviet cities of Zaporozhye, Leningrad (now St. Peters- burg), and Minsk, as well as in working on the exhibit floor five to six hours a day explaining and answering questions about the exhibit and any and all questions about life in America. We met in Washington beforehand for a three-week training period. This was to brief the guides, most of whom only had knowledge of the Russian language in common, about American housing and all of its elements. We had architects and builders brief us, and we had sessions on the Russian terms for housing. We also had experts brief us on various statistics about life in America (e.g., average salaries for Americans; costs of items, including higher education and health care; unemployment benefits). We were given printed materials with this information included, as well as long vocabulary lists. Early on we were assigned two different stands each on the exhibit floor. For each stand, there was a script in Rus- sian that we were encouraged to memorize. In fact, after working a couple of weeks on any stand it would get tiring answering the same questions over and over, so usually we would exchange stands with other guides every few weeks. Each of the stands had panels with average prices for the various items on display, so that Soviet visitors could see what these would cost the American consumer. We had three kitchens (a country kitchen, a modern kitchen, and the kitchen of the future). For almost all urban Soviets, housing had improved immensely after World War II, with plumbing and electricity; but it still consisted of modest apartments, and the idea of having your own house in the suburbs with an expansive kitchen was simply incredible. There were no scripts on combating disinformation, just facts and your own personal experience. I recall that my friend and eventual roommate (John Herbst, a future U.S. ambassador to Uzbekistan and Ukraine) and I did an Econ 101 tutorial for the other guides, a simple macroeconomic After serving in 1975-1976 as an exhibit guide for Technology for the American Home, Tom Robertson was deputy director of the Photography USA exhibit in 1977. Here he is, during that latter assignment, mixing it up with Soviet visitors in Novosibirsk. PAULSCHOELLHAMER Who Had It Better? Tom Robertson Technology for the American Home / Zaporozhye, Leningrad, Minsk / 1975-1976