A Russian Journal

by John Steinbeck

  We said our good-bys. The manager of the farm and the agronome rode with us to the crossroads to see us off. The manager asked us to send some of the pictures we had taken of the farm, for they would like to put them up in the club, and this we will do.

  On the way in to Kiev we went to sleep in the back of the car, from a combination of weariness and overeating. And we do not know how many times the driver stopped for water, or how many times his car broke down. We rolled out of the car and into bed in Kiev, and slept for about twelve hours.

  The next morning we went to the river to see the barges bringing produce from the north and south for the markets at Kiev. There were barges of firewood, and little boats piled high with hay. Great loads of tomatoes, and cucumbers, and cabbages moved on the river and landed at the feet of the city. These were the products of the collective farms, brought in to be sold in the open market. We followed the produce up the cliff to the marketplace, where the sellers sat in long lines with their produce in front of them, old people and children, for the young people were working in the harvest fields.

  From the market we went to a gigantic bakery, where the black bread is baked for the whole city. The manager put white coats on us before we could enter. Part of the bakery is in ruins and is being rebuilt and enlarged. The manager told us that while the city was under siege the bakery had continued to work, and even while bombs were falling on the buildings the ovens had turned out bread.

  There were mountains of bread. It was a completely mechanized bakery, with mixers, kneaders, baking ovens all automatic. The great chains of black bread come through the oven and drop off and are piled on the carts to go out to the city.

  The people were very proud of this bakery, and the manager asked us whether in America we had any such wonderful things. And here we found again something that we had found so often, that Russian people truly believe they invented these things. They love automatic machinery, and it is their dream to be completely mechanized in practically all their techniques. To them mechanization means ease and comfort, and plenty of food, and a general richness. They love machines as much as Americans do, and a new automobile will draw a crowd to stand around and gaze at it almost with reverence.

  In the afternoon I was interviewed for a Ukrainian literary magazine. It was a very long and painful experience. The editor, a sharp-faced alert little man, asked questions that were two paragraphs long. They were translated, and by the time I understood the last part I had forgotten the first part. I answered them as well as I could. This would be translated to the editor, and then the whole thing written down. The questions were highly complicated and highly literary. And when I answered a question, I wasn’t at all sure that the translation was getting over. There were two problems. One was my complete difference of background from the interviewer, and the second was my English, probably quite colloquial, which did not register very clearly with the translator who had been trained in academic English. To make sure that I was not misquoted by accident, I asked to have the translation of the Russian back into English. I was right, the answers I was supposed to have given did not very closely approximate what I had said. This was not done on purpose; it was not even the difficulty of trying to communicate from one language to another. It was more than language. It was translation from one kind of thinking to another. They were very pleasant and honest people, but we just could not communicate closely. And this was my last interview; I never tried it again. And when in Moscow I was asked for an interview, I suggested that the questions be given to me in writing, that I be given a chance to think them over, to answer them in English, and to check on the translation. And since this was not done, I was not interviewed again.

  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. And after a while we began to anticipate the questions before they were asked, for we knew the articles on which they were based almost by heart.

  There was one literary question which came up on all occasions. We even knew when to expect it, for our questioner’s eyes sharpened, and he leaned forward in his chair and inspected us closely. We knew we were going to be asked how we liked Simonov’s play The Russian Question.

  Simonov is probably the most popular writer in the Soviet Union at the present time. Recently he came to America for a while, and on his return to Russia he wrote this play. It is probably the most performed drama of the time. It opened simultaneously in over three hundred theaters in the Soviet Union. Mr. Simonov’s play is about American journalism, and it is necessary to set down a short synopsis of it. It is cast partly in New York, and partly in a place that resembles Long Island. In New York its set is approximately Bleeck’s restaurant, near the Herald Tribune building. And the play is roughly this:

  An American correspondent who, years before, had been to Russia and had written a favorable book about Russia, is employed by a newspaper tycoon, a capitalist, a hard, crude, overpowering, overbearing newspaper baron, a man of no principles and no virtues. The tycoon, for purposes of winning an election, wants to prove through his newspapers that the Russians are going to fight the Americans. He employs the correspondent to go to Russia, and to come back and report that the Russians want to go to war with America. The tycoon offers him an immense amount of money, thirty thousand dollars to be exact, and complete security for the future if the correspondent will do this. Now this newspaperman, who is broke, wants to marry a certain girl and wants to have a little country place in Long Island. He undertakes the job. He goes to Russia, and he finds that the Russians do not want to go to war with the Americans. He comes back and secretly writes his book, and writes it exactly opposite from what the tycoon wants.

  Meanwhile, on his advance of money, he has bought the house on Long Island in the country, he has married the girl, and some little security is on the way. When his book is turned in, the tycoon not only kills the book, but makes it impossible for the correspondent to publish it anyplace else. And such is the power of this newspaper baron that the correspondent cannot ever get a job again, and can’t have his book or his future writing published. He loses his house in the country; his wife, who has wanted security, leaves him. At this time his best friend, for a reason which is not dramatically exposed, is killed in an altitude flight in a defective airplane. Our correspondent is left broke and unhappy, but with the sense that he has told the truth, and that that is the best thing to do.

  This roughly is the play The Russian Question about which we were asked so often. And we usually answered in this way: 1) It is not a good play, in any language; 2) The actors do not talk like Americans, and within our knowledge do not act like Americans; 3) While there are some bad publishers in America, they have nowhere near the power that is indicated in this play; 4) No book publisher in America takes orders from anyone, the proof being that Mr. Simonov’s own books are printed in America; and last, we wish a good play could be written about American journalism, but this is not it. This play, far from adding to Russian understanding of America and Americans, will probably have an opposite effect.

  We were asked about the play so often that after a while we wrote a synopsis of a play which we called “The American Question.” We began reading it to our questioners. In our play, Mr. Simonov is commissioned by Pravda to come to America and to write a series of articles proving that America is a Western degenerate democracy. Mr. Simonov comes to America, and he finds that America is not only not degenerate, but is not even Western, unless the viewing point is Moscow. Simonov goes back to Russia and secretly writes his conviction that America is not a decadent democracy. He submits his manuscript to Pravda. He is promptly removed from the Writers’ Union. He loses his country house. His wife, a good Communist girl, deserts him, and he starves to death, just the same as the American must in his play.

  At the end of this synopsis, th
ere were usually some chuckles among our questioners. We would say, “If you find this ridiculous, it is no more ridiculous than Mr. Simonov’s play The Russian Question is about America. Both plays are equally bad, for the same reasons.”

  While once or twice our synopsis precipitated a violent argument, in most cases it caused only laughter and a change of subject.

  In Kiev there is a place called the Cocktail Bar. It is spelled in Russian letters so we couldn’t read it, but that is the way it is pronounced, Cocktail Bar. And it is like an American cocktail bar. There is a round bar with stools, and little tables, and some of the young people of Kiev go there in the evening. They have tall drinks which are called cocktails, and they are wonderful drinks. There is the Kiev cocktail, and the Moscow cocktail, and the Tiflis cocktail, and oddly enough they are always pink in color and they always taste strongly of grenadine.

  The Russians, when they make cocktails, seem to believe that the more ingredients, the better the cocktail. There was one that we tasted which had twelve different liquors in it. We forgot what it was called. We didn’t want to remember. We were a little surprised to find cocktail bars in Russia, since the cocktail is a very decadent drink. And surely the Kiev cocktail and the Moscow cocktail are the most decadent of cocktails that we have ever tasted.

  Our time in Kiev was up, and we prepared to fly back to Moscow. The people here had been most hospitable, and most kind and generous, and besides that we had liked them very much. They were intelligent, laughing people, people with a sense of humor, and people with energy. In the ruins of their country they had set out doggedly to build new houses, new factories, new machinery, and a new life. And they said to us again and again, “Come back in a few years and see what we will have accomplished.”

  CHAPTER 6

  BACK IN MOSCOW we indulged a hunger for our own language and our own people, for, kind and generous as the Ukrainians had been to us, we were foreigners. We felt good about talking to people who knew who Superman was, and Louis Armstrong. We went out to Ed Gilmore’s pleasant house and listened to his swing records. Pee Wee Russell, the clarinetist, sends them to him. Ed says he does not know how he could spend the winter without Pee Wee’s contribution of hot records.

  Sweet Joe Newman got some Russian girls, and we went dancing in Moscow night clubs. Sweet Joe is a wonderful dancer, but Capa uses long rabbit leaps, amusing but dangerous.

  The Embassy people were very kind to us. General Macon, the Military Attaché, contributed D.D.T. bombs to protect us from the flies when we left Moscow, for in some of the bombed and destroyed areas the flies are troublesome. And in one or two of the places where we had slept, there were other troublesome little visitors. Some of the people in the Embassy had not been home for a long time, and they wanted to know about simple little things like baseball prospects, and how the football season was likely to go, and elections in various parts in the country.

  On Sunday we went to the war trophy display, near Gorki Park, along the edge of the river. There were German airplanes of all kinds, German tanks, German artillery, machine guns, weapon-carriers, tank-destroyers, specimens of the German equipment taken by the Soviet Army. And walking among the weapons were soldiers with their children and their wives, explaining these things professionally. The children looked with wonder at the equipment their fathers had helped to capture.

  There were boat races on the river, little water-scooters with outboard motors, and we noticed that many of the motors were Evinrudes and various other American makes. The races were among clubs and workers’ groups. Some of the boats were raced by girls. We bet on one particularly beautiful blond girl, simply because she was beautiful, but she didn’t win. If anything, the girls were tougher and more competitive racers than the men. They took more hazardous turns, and they handled their boats with a fine recklessness. Sweet Lana was with us, and she was dressed in a navy blue suit, and a hat with a little veil, and she wore a silver star in her lapel buttonhole.

  Later we went to Red Square, where a queue of people at least a quarter of a mile long stood waiting to go through Lenin’s tomb. In front of the door of the tomb two young soldiers stood like wax figures. We could not even see that they blinked their eyes. All afternoon, and nearly every afternoon, a slow thread of people marches through the tomb to look at the dead face of Lenin in his glass casket; thousands of people, and they move past the glass casket and look for a moment on the domed forehead and the sharp nose and the pointed chin of Lenin. It is like a religious thing, although they would not call it religious.

  At the other end of Red Square there is a round marble platform, where the czars used to execute people, and now it supports gigantic bouquets of paper flowers and a little colony of red flags.

  We had only come in to Moscow for the purpose of getting transportation to Stalingrad. Capa made a contact for developing his films. He would have preferred to bring the films home undeveloped, for facilities and controls in the United States are better. But he had a sixth sense about it, and his hunch turned out to be a very good idea in the end.

  As usual we left Moscow not under the best circumstances, for again there had been a late party and we had had very little sleep. Again we sat in the V.I.P. room under the portrait of Stalin, and drank tea for an hour and a half before our plane was ready to leave. And we got the same kind of plane we had had before. The ventilation did not work on this plane either. The baggage was piled about in the aisles, and we took off.

  Mr. Chmarsky’s gremlin was very active on this trip. Almost everything he laid out or planned did not come off. There was no chapter or committee of Voks in Stalingrad, consequently, when we arrived at the little wind-blown airport building, there was no one there to meet us, and Mr. Chmarsky had to get on the phone to call Stalingrad for a car. Meanwhile we went outside, and we saw a line of women selling watermelons and cantaloupes, and very good ones. We dripped watermelon juice down our shirt fronts for an hour and a half, until a car arrived, and since we used it quite a bit, and it had a certain individuality, we must describe this car. It was not a car but a bus. It was a bus designed to hold about twenty people, and it was a Model A Ford. When the Ford Company abandoned the Model A, the Russian government bought the machinery with which it had been made. Model A Fords were manufactured in the Soviet Union, both for light automobiles and for light trucks and busses, and this was one of them. It had springs, I suppose, but it couldn’t have had many or they would have been broken. There was no physical evidence of any springs at all. The driver who was assigned was a fine co-operative man, with an almost holy attitude toward automobiles. Later, when we sat alone with him in the bus, he would simply go over the list of cars that he loved.

  “Buick,” he would say, “Cadillac, Lincoln, Pontiac, Studebaker,” and he would sigh deeply. These were the only English words he knew.

  The road to Stalingrad was the roughest area in the whole country. It was miles to the city from the airport, and if we could have gone off the road it would have been comparatively easy and smooth riding. This so-called road was a series of chucks and holes and great deep gushes. It was unpaved, and the recent rains had translated part of the road into ponds. On the open steppe, which stretched away as far as you could see, there were herds of goats and cows grazing. The railroad track paralleled the road, and along the track we saw lines of burned-out gondolas and freight cars which had been fired and destroyed during the war. The whole area for miles, on all sides of Stalingrad, was littered with the debris of war: burned-out tanks, and half-tracks, and troop carriers, and rusting pieces of broken artillery. The salvage crews went about the country to draw in this wreckage and cut it up to be used as scrap in the tractor factory at Stalingrad.

  We had to hold on with both hands while our bus bumped and leaped over the country. We seemed to go on endlessly across the steppe, until at last, over a little rise, we saw Stalingrad below us and the Volga behind it.

  On the edges of the city there were hundreds of new little houses
growing up, but once in the city itself there was little except destruction. Stalingrad is a long strip of a city along the bank of the Volga, nearly twenty miles long, and only about two miles wide in its widest part. We had seen ruined cities before, but most of them had been ruined by bombing. This was quite different. In a bombed city a few walls stand upright; this city was destroyed by rocket and by shell fire. It was fought over for months, attacked and retaken, and attacked again, and most of the walls were flattened. What few walls stand up are pitted and rotted with machine-gun fire. We had read, of course, about the incredible defense of Stalingrad, and one thing occurred to us in looking over this broken city, that when a city is attacked and its buildings knocked down, the fallen buildings offer fine shelter to the defending army—shelter, and holes, and nests out of which it is almost impossible to drive a determined force. Here, in this raving ruin, was one of the great turning points of the war. When, after months of siege, of attack and counterattack, the Germans were finally surrounded and captured, even their stupidest military men must have felt somewhere in their souls that the war had been lost.

  In the central square were the remains of what had been a large department store, and here the Germans had made their last stand when they were surrounded. This is where Von-Paulus was captured and where the whole siege crumbled.

  Across the street was the repaired Intourist Hotel where we were to stay. We were given two large rooms. Our windows looked out on acres of rubble, broken brick and concrete and pulverized plaster, and in the wreckage the strange dark weeds that always seem to grow in destroyed places. During the time we were in Stalingrad we grew more and more fascinated with this expanse of ruin, for it was not deserted. Underneath the rubble were cellars and holes, and in these holes many people lived. Stalingrad was a large city, and it had had apartment houses and many flats, and now has none except the new ones on the outskirts, and its population has to live some place. It lives in the cellars of the buildings where the apartments once were. We would watch out of the windows of our room, and from behind a slightly larger pile of rubble would suddenly appear a girl, going to work in the morning, putting the last little touches to her hair with a comb. She would be dressed neatly, in clean clothes, and she would swing out through the weeds on her way to work. How they could do it we have no idea. How they could live underground and still keep clean, and proud, and feminine. Housewives came out of other holes and went away to market, their heads covered with white headcloths, and market baskets on their arms. It was a strange and heroic travesty on modern living.