The Drunken Bicycle: Travels in the Former Soviet World

By: Frank Ward, Photography; Vivian Leskes, Text

This photo book with essays is the product of more than twenty years of work and exploration in all fifteen of the republics that formerly comprised the Soviet Union. Leskes and Ward were first introduced to the post-Soviet world in 2001, when, funded by a US Department of State (DOS) grant, Leskes trained English faculty at a university in Poltava, Ukraine. Later, she received a Fulbright grant in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) in Irkutsk, Siberia and then worked for many years as an English Language Specialist for the DOS. Ward served as a Cultural Envoy for the DOS in several former Soviet republics, in addition to holding the position of Professor of Photography and being a prize-winning photographer. Together they explored the Russian-speaking world, including remote corners of Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Baltics, and Mongolia. 

Ward’s photographs and Leskes’s essays are compiled into a book that captures the humor, passion and pain of life after Soviet communism. In the words of author and reviewer Roland Merullo, the photographs and prose present “the corruption and generosity, the wreckage and celebration, the human spirit alive and well in a sometimes bleak, sometimes festive, always inside-out, post-communist world.”

ISBN 978-1-5422-1304-2 

12" x 11" Hardcover