A Russian Journal

by John Steinbeck

  Other American reviewers found the book highly satisfying, “objective, impartial” and “readable because [Steinbeck] loves real people and because he has a sense of humor that never lets him down.” “This is one of the best books about Russia since Maurice Baring wrote his ‘Puppet Show of Memory’ in 1922,” effused the reviewer for the New York Sun. Steinbeck “has a most observant eye, a deadpan humor and a command of the English language unsurpassed by any American of our time. The Steinbeck style is one of the marvels of the age. It is entirely unpretentious. . . .” Bernstein, among others, praised Capa’s lens, which “suits the prose which surrounds it, lean and restrictive, without the furbelows of the self-conscious artist, and yet full of sensitivity and attention to detail.” And supportive reviewers acknowledged that Steinbeck and Capa’s book would help the West better “understand the Russians emotionally,” a real contribution. Again, one of the most sensitive reviews posed a tough question: What were the political implications of such a book? Joseph Henry Jackson, writing for the San Francisco Chronicle, notes that the text would please no political faction—as the author himself admitted in his final paragraph. “A good deal here,” notes Jackson, “will probably annoy the devout Left, for the two Americans, visiting with the best will in the world, were often irritated by the way things were done in Russia, by the miles of red tape that had to be unwound whatever they wanted to do. . . .” He continues, “On the other hand, the case-hardened Right will also be irritated by the book, on the ground that nobody’s got any right to be saying a good word on behalf of any kind of Russian excepting a dead Russian.”

  Indeed, this trip to Russia brought back for both Steinbeck and Capa the specter of their own political agendas. The suspicion that The Grapes of Wrath, with its magnificent endorsement of “we” over “I,” was communist propaganda lingered in the minds of some, certainly the FBI, who had maintained a file on Steinbeck since 1943. The truth was that Steinbeck had long despised the communist agenda: In Dubious Battle, a novel about striking workers in California, shows the communist organizers to be self-serving, willing to sacrifice the people’s needs for the party’s. When writing The Grapes of Wrath, with its emphasis on fair treatment for the working man, Steinbeck insisted that the lyrics for the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” be printed on the endpapers so that there would be no doubt about his patriotism. “The fascist crowd will try to sabotage this book because it is revolutionary,” he wrote his publisher. “They will try to give it the communist angle. However, the Battle Hymn is American and intensely so . . . if both words and music are there the book is keyed into the American scene from the beginning.”

  In spite of his protestations, however, muted accusations that Steinbeck was “Red” lingered into the 1950s. In 1939, as The Grapes of Wrath was about to be published, he was convinced that the FBI was investigating him—in Monterey a local bookstore owner reported being questioned by Hoover’s men and in Los Gatos his name had been turned into the local sheriff’s office. FBI files on Steinbeck uncategorically deny that he was under investigation in the late 1930s, but they do detail a full investigation made of the writer in 1943 “to determine his suitability to hold a commission in the U.S. Army,” a commission denied because of suspected communist sympathies. “Associates and friends,” the FBI report notes, said that although he “exercised poor discretion during his early days of writing by associating with some elements of the Communist Party, he was not interested in advancing the cause of the Party but in gathering material for his writings on certain social conditions existing in the US at that time.” In fact, evidence of communist leanings is decidedly thin: in 1936 and 1938, Steinbeck published two articles in the liberal Carmel magazine owned by Ella Winter and Lincoln Steffens, the Pacific Weekly; in 1936, he also lent his support to and possibly attended the Western Writers Conference, later labeled a “communist front” according to the committee on Un-American Activities; in 1938, he gave his 1936 San Francisco News accounts to the Simon Lubin Society, allegedly “a Communist front for California agrarian penetration”; in 1938, “the Committee to Aid Agricultural Workers was organized under Steinbeck’s leadership”; in 1946, he was invited to a reception in New York for three visiting Soviet literary figures. That was it. John Steinbeck was no communist, but he was very curious about 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, alwa
ys 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.

  SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

  Atkinson, Oriana. “John Steinbeck, and Robert Capa, Record a Russian Journey.” New York Times Book Review (9 May 1948): 3.

  Benson, Jackson. The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer. New York: Penguin, 1984.

  Clancy, Charles J. “Steinbeck’s A Russian Journal.” A Study Guide to Steinbeck, Part II. Ed. Tetsumaro Hayashi. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1979.

  Ditsky, John. “Between Acrobats and Seals: Steinbeck in the U.S.S.R.” Steinbeck Quarterly 15 (1982): 23-29.

  FBI File #100-106224 (subject: John Steinbeck).

  Sherekh, Yuriy. “Why Did You Not Want to See, Mr. Steinbeck?” The Ukrainian Quarterly 4 (1948): 317-24.

  Slater, John F. “America Past and Soviet Present.” Steinbeck Quarterly 8 (1975): 95-104.

  Steinbeck, John. Steinbeck: A Life in Letters. Eds. Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten. New York: Viking, 1975.

  Steinbeck, John. “Robert Capa: An Appreciation.” Photography (September 1954): 48-53.

  Stojko, Wolodymyr, and Wolodymyr Serhiychuk. “John Steinbeck in Ukraine: What the Secret Soviet Archives Reveal.” The Ukrainian Quarterly 51 (1995): 62-76.

  Whelan, Richard. Robert Capa, a Biography. New York: Knopf, 1985.

  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, we would have a story too, the story of not being able to do it. With this in mind we called George Cornish at the Herald Tribune, had lunch with him, and told him our project. He agreed that it would be a good thing to do and offered to help us in any way.

  Together we decided on several things: We should not go in with chips on our shoulders and we should try to be neither critical nor favorable. We would try to do honest reporting, to set down what we saw and heard without editorial comment, without drawing conclusions about things we didn’t know sufficiently, and without becoming angry at the delays of bureaucracy. We knew there would be many things we couldn’t understand, many things we wouldn’t like, many things that would make us uncomfortable. This is always true of a foreign country. But we determined that if there should be criticism, it would be criticism of the thing after seeing it, not before.

  In due time our application for visas went to Moscow, and within a reasonable time mine came through. I went over to the Russian Consulate in New York, and the Consul General said, “We agree that this is a good thing to do, but why do you have to take a cameraman? We have lots of cameramen in the Soviet Union.”

  And I replied, “But you have no Capas. If the thing is to be done at all, it must be done as a whole, as a collaboration.”

  There was some reluctance about letting a cameraman into the Soviet Union, and none about letting me in, and this seemed strange to us, for censorship can control film, but it cannot control the mind of an observer. Here we must explain something that we found to be true during our whole trip. The camera is one of the most frightening of modern weapons, particularly to people who have been in warfare, who have been bombed and shelled, for at the back of a bombing run is invariably a photograph. In back of ruined towns, and cities, and factories, there is aerial mapping, or spy mapping, usually with a camera. Therefore the camera is a feared instrument, and a man with a camera is suspected and watched wherever he
goes. And if you do not believe this, try to take your Brownie No. 4 anywhere near Oak Ridge, or the Panama Canal, or near any one of a hundred of our experimental areas. In the minds of most people today the camera is the forerunner of destruction, and it is suspected, and rightly so.

  I don’t think Capa and I really ever thought that we would be able to do the job we wanted to do. That we were able to do it is as much a surprise to us as to anyone else. We were surprised when our visas came through, and we held a mild celebration with Willy behind the bar when they did. At that point I had an accident and broke my leg and was laid up for two months. But Capa went about assembling his equipment.

  There had been no camera coverage of the Soviet Union by an American for many years, so Capa provided the very best of photographic equipment and duplicated all of it in case some of it might be lost. He took the Contax and Rolleiflex that he had used during the war, of course, but he took extras also. He took so many extras, and so much film, and so many lights, that his overweight charge on the overseas airline was something like three hundred dollars.