A Russian Journal

communism's effect on the average man.

Nor was Robert Capa a communist, although his passport was confiscated in Paris in 1953 on allegations of communist sympathies; the evidence in his FBI file as thin as that in Steinbeck's. According to Whelan, Capa's dossier records only trivial associations with communism: 'he had sold photographs to Regards during the Spanish Civia War; some of his pictures had appeared in a magazine published by Friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade; he had been either a member or an honorary member of the 'Radical anti-fascist' Photo League; he had gone to the Soviet Union with Steinbeck; the Daily Worker had reported his Herald Tribune Forum speech with approval. In 1950 it was added that he had spoken out against jailing the Hollywood Ten.' Both men, according to Capa, 'stated very clearly before and during our trip that we were not Communists or Communist-sympathizers.' For their careful stance, however, they were reviled by the Soviet press after the book's publication, described as 'gangsters' and 'hyenas.'

In the cold war climate of mutual distrust between the two countries, the most emblematic moment in A Russian Journal may well be Capa's first photographs:

Three huge double windows overlooked the street. As time went on, Capa posted himself in the windows more and more, photographing little incidents that happened under our windows. Across the street, on the second floor, there was a man who ran a kind of camera repair shop. He worked long hours on equipment. And we discovered late in the game that while we were photographing him, he was photographing us.

Indeed, KGB files indicate that Soviet authorities scrutinized movements of the pair throughout the fully orchestrated trip; instructions were precise:

Steinbeck is a man of conservative conviction and, in addition, he has recently become more right-wing oriented. That's why our approach to him should be especially cautious and we should avoid showing him something that can do us any harm.

The KGB report from Kiev was dutiful:

The task that the UOKS set for itself was to primarily show the visitors how the national economy and cultural valuables of the Ukrainian SSR were destroyed during the war and the great efforts of our people in restoration and reconstruction of the country.

The bulk of the report summarizes events and speculates on the attitude of Steinbeck and Capa toward what they saw:

I was with Capa when he took all of his pictures. He had an opportunity to take pictures depicting beggars, queues, German prisoners of war, and secret sites (i.e. the construction of the gas pipe-line). He did not take photos of this kind and approached picture-taking without reporter imprudence. Of the photos which cannot be considered favorably, I can point to only two: in the Museum of Ukranian Art, he took a picture of an emaciated woman-visitor, and on our way to the kolkhoz, he took a picture of a kolkhoz family wearing shabby clothes…

However, a close scrutiny of relations between Steinbeck and Capa also forces us to stipulate that Capa is more loyally and friendly disposed to us. Steinbeck in an underhand way gave Capa instructions to look for vulnerable, in his opinion, aspects of our life.

Steinbeck's frequent silences made officials uncomfortable. Capa's camera-he shot over four thousand photos-made them doubly uncomfortable.

A Russian Journal is an important book in the Steinbeck canon, much more so than has been acknowledged. Read for what it is, not for what it fails to do, Steinbeck's text sensitively captures a moment in Soviet history, as he intended. Steinbeck's carefully rendered vignettes, like Capa's photos, replicate his emotional response to a country and a people flattened by war, fed on propaganda, denied free speech, and convinced of the truth of their programmed responses. But they are people, always people.

And the trip to Russia also marks a crucial stage in John Steinbeck's gradual shift from his 1930s commitment to group man to his subsequent concern with individual consciousness. In Russia, the group had subsumed individual creativity, thought, and action.

“Wherever we went, the questions asked us had a certain likeness, and we gradually discovered that the questions all grew from a single source. The intellectuals of the Ukraine based their questions, both political and literary, on articles they had read in Pravda… we knew the articles on which they were based almost by heart.' Steinbeck's fictional perspective was, in fact, shifting from the detached scientific viewpoint to the highly personal and moral stance given clear voice in his works after A Russian Journal. Immediately after his return he started thinking about his 'long slow piece of work,' the novel that would become East of Eden in five years, the study of individual moral choice. Traveling in Russia, he'd seen what a repressive regime could accomplish. In 1949, he wrote to John O'Hara:

I think I believe one thing powerfully-that the only creative thing our species has is the individual lonely mind. Two people can create a child but I know of no other thing created by a group. The group ungoverned by individual thinking is a horrible destructive principle. The great change in the last 2,000 years was the Christian idea that the individual soul was very precious.

In A Russian Journal, Steinbeck and Capa captured a few of those individual Russian souls who endured in a system ready to smother all creativity: 'The Russians have been doing such bad things lately with their art stultification and their silly attacks on musicians and the decree about no Russian being allowed to speak to foreigners that it makes me sad,' Steinbeck wrote to a friend in February 1948. 'And the small Russian people are such nice people.' That's what this book still reminds its readers, a goal not so far distant from his efforts, ten long years earlier, to give human identity to the amorphous refugees from Oklahoma.

CHAPTER 1

IT WILL BE NECESSARY to say first how this story and how this trip started, and what its intention was. In late March, I, and the pronoun is used by special arrangement with John Gunther, was sitting in the bar of the Bedford Hotel on East Fortieth Street. A play I had written four times had melted and run out between my fingers. I sat on the bar stool wondering what to do next. At that moment Robert Capa came into the bar looking a little disconsolate. A poker game he had been nursing for several months had finally passed away. His book had gone to press and he found himself with nothing to do. Willy, the bartender, who is always sympathetic, suggested a Suissesse, a drink which Willy makes better than anybody else in the world. We were depressed, not so much by the news but by the handling of it. For news is no longer news, at least that part of it which draws the most attention. News has become a matter of punditry. A man sitting at a desk in Washington or New York reads the cables and rearranges them to fit his own mental pattern and his by-line. What we often read as news now is not news at all but the opinion of one of half a dozen pundits as to what that news means.

Willy set the two pale green Suissesses in front of us and we began to discuss what there was left in the world that an honest and liberal man could do. In the papers every day there were thousands of words about Russia. What Stalin was thinking about, the plans of the Russian General Staff, the disposition of troops, experiments with atomic weapons and guided missiles, all of this by people who had not been there, and whose sources were not above reproach. And it occurred to us that there were some things that nobody wrote about Russia, and they were the things that interested us most of all. What do the people wear there? What do they serve at dinner? Do they have parties? What food is there? How do they make love, and how do they die? What do they talk about? Do they dance, and sing, and play? Do the children go to school? It seemed to us that it might be a good thing to find out these things, to photograph them, and to write about them. Russian politics are important just as ours are, but there must be the great other side there, just as there is here. There must be a private life of the Russian people, and that we could not read about because no one wrote about it, and no one photographed it.

Willy mixed another Suissesse, and he agreed with us that he might be interested in such things too, and that this was the kind of thing that he would like to read. And so we decided to try it-to do a simple reporting job backed up with photographs. We would work together. We would avoid politics and the larger issues. We would stay away from the Kremlin, from military men and from military plans. We wanted to get to the Russian people if we could. It must be admitted that we did not know whether we could or not, and when we spoke to friends about it they were quite sure we couldn't.

We made our plans in this way: If we could do it, it would be good, and a good story. And if we couldn't do it,